DISRUPTING THE SINGLE STORY: CULTIVATING MORE COMPLETE STORIES ABOUT ACADEMICALLY HIGH PERFORMING YOUNG BLACK MEN By Sakeena Everett A D ISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education - Doctor of Philosophy 2015 ABSTRACT DISRUPTING THE SINGLE STORY: CULTIVATING MORE COMPLETE STORIES ABOUT ACAD EMICALLY HIGH PERFORMING YOUNG BLACK MEN By Sakeena Everett Y oung Black men are often boxed into severely limited scripts that define what it means to be Black, male and scholarly. This dissertation is concerned with learning how young Black men succeed academically in secondary settings and documenting the substance of Black life . Furthermore, it illuminates the voices of students whose perspectives are often void in research, yet are invaluable in preparing teachers to work more effe ctively with this population. The four Black male stude nts represented in this study co me from a variety of family backgr ounds, socioeconomic statuses and school contexts . Disrupting the Single Story: Cultivating More Complete Stories About Academically High Performing Young Black Men is a longitudinal , cross - context , ethnographic case study . In order to investigate the academic performance of the young Black men in study, I employed two primary phases. In Phase I , I developed a curricular innovation ; i t began in a pre - college , residential university - sponsored summer enrichment program, where I was the writing instructor for the student participants. I developed and implemented the writing course curriculum for rising seniors in high school from urban s chools, with the following aims in mind: expose students to college level texts about critical theories in education, cultivate college level academic writing, develop scholarly research skills, increase college readiness, and nurture careers in education. In Phase II , I followed the young men for one year in their respective high schools, which spanned across three different school districts in the M idwest. Because of my access with the young men in and across different academic settings, I was able to contextualize ethnographically how the young men constructed, negotiated, and embodied scholarly literacy identities in different spaces. T wo crucial findings are (1) metaphors function as a powerful catalyst for unpacking the racia lized and gendered litera cy identities of the young men and (2) intersectional identities were leveraged to assert agency in their academic and non - academic communities . These findings deepen our understandings about how young Black men are achieving while Black and male and they also shed light on ways teachers can recognize, cultivate , and sustain scholarly literacy identities among their Black male students. Copyright by SAKEENA EVERETT 2015 v This dissertation is dedicat ed to Aaronwick, Rajon, Shawn, and Will who have gifted me with new understandings about the significance of Black life. & To Cheryl, Ernest, Cherene, and Keaton - It is because of you that I am. vi A CKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to give my sincerest appreciation to Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon and Will for allowing me access into their lives and the opportunity to lea rn and grow as a person. These young men are daring and dynamic human beings. Our daily time together was at moments very intense and will forever in my mind be extremely invaluable. They invited me into their lives because they trusted me and believed that I might be worthy of sharing in their voices and their stories. Without their openness, strength, and moments of vulnerability none of this would have been possible. I am also thankful for all of the faculty, administrators, teachers, and parents f rom Success Ticket University (STU), Urbantown, Quahog, and Northwood. They granted me opportunities to do what I love most - teaching, learning with and mentoring young people. Teaching Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon , and Will in one context and then learning w ith them in their respective high schools and communities was incredible. Seeing their differences across academic settings helped me to look critically at myself at a scholar, mentor, teacher, and friend. As a teacher, I know that it can be difficult at times to let strangers into your classroom or school. We live in a time when teachers and administrators in K - 12 settings are generally not valued and respected. As such, the fear of not knowing how your efforts will be received is real and I want to th ank each teacher and administrator who welcomed me into their buildings and classrooms to learn and grow with the scholars. During my time at Michigan State University, I had several mentors who helped me to bring this dissertation to fruition. I must a cknowledge my affirming and supportive all - star dissertation committee. They are model scholars and I am eternally grateful for their time, vii talents , and investments in my life. Django Paris, my advisor and dissertation co - chair believed in my ideas from the beginning and helped me to cultivate my confidence and skills in becoming a humanizing researcher. He opened up a whole new world of research that fits my identity and commitments to honoring young people in research in ways that mutually beneficial f or my students and myself. Terry Flennaugh, my dissertation co - doors down the hallway from my office in Erickson Hall always opened the door when I knocked. He listened to all of my ideas no matter how big or small and he nurtured my humanity as a graduate student learning how to become a researcher. Dorinda Carter Andrews helped me to acquire the language to name my work and myself. David Kirkland always pus hed me beyond intellectual limits and opened up whole new worlds of knowing. My imagination and intellectual curiosities has greatly expanded because of him. April Baker Bell once shared a classroom with me as a graduate student before she became my comm ittee member. She always points out strengths in my work and me in unexpected ways in ways and builds my confidence as a budding scholar. of English Cultivating Ne w Voices of Scholars of Color program (CNV) while I worked on this study. My cohort of junior scholars and senior faculty mentors was amazing because of their emotional support and cutting edge research methodologies and theories. Look out for the awesom e and emerging scholars : Steven Alvarez, Donja Bridges, Keisha McIntosh Allen, Lamar Johnson, Cati de los Rios, Marilisa Jimenez, Clifford Lee, Reanae McNeal, Sandra Osorio, LaToya Sawyer and Joanna Wong. I want to give a special thanks to my CNV mentor, Carol D. Lee who helped me to recognize, tease out and value my own taken for granted assumptions in viii my pedagogical planning and execution. She has also pushed me to map a trajectory that will benefit Blac k male students beyond this study. I was also a King Chavez Parks (KCP) Future Faculty Fellow (FFF) by way of the Alliance of Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP). My KCP fellowship sponsored my final year in graduate school and I am extremel y grateful. AGEP has been a critical source of personal, professional and financial support during while at MSU. I want to especially acknowledge Julius Jackson, Tony Nunez, Steven Thomas and Deanne Hubbell who altogether always had warm hearts, bright sm iles, and answers to problems I needed addressed over the years. Thank you Dr. Gunnings - Moton for opportunities to activate my love for working with the Urban Educators Cohort Program (UECP). Dr. Gunnings - Moton welcomed me to MSU years ago in my Advance to Adventure experience the year before I attended MSU. She has trusted and supported me in numerous ways, which have helped me to become more refined in my teaching, research, professional development , and leadership. I must also thank my UECP undergrad uate students, Robyn Hubbard, Caitlin Hamilton, Lazarius Miller , Maya Alalouf and Allie Voigt. I knew each of these bright young people since their freshmen year at MSU and shared the graduation stage with most of them . It was truly an honor to see them blossom over the years! Beyond being bright, they each were fearless leaders in the classroom and they were the first students to step up to the plate and represent issues in urban education among their peers when I instituted the UECP Student Advisory Bo ard. These young people showed up early, worked hard and they were always the last ones to leave after everything was completed for the day . They poured their hearts and souls into education and they give me hope about the next generation of teachers. ix There wer e several professors beyond my dissertation committee who let me work on their research projects and mentor me in teaching university level courses over the last five years. I want to thank Christy Byrd, Julie Lindquist, Bump Halbritt er, Christopher Dunbar, Laura Apol and Dorothea Anagnostopolous for helping me to develop skills and experiences as a researcher. I want to give a special thanks to Margaret Crocco, our department chair , and MSU professors Patricia Edwards, Avner Segall, Mary Juzwik, Angie, Calabrese - Barton, Tanya Bartell, Sylvia Hollifield , Terah Chambers, Christa Porta, Reitumetse Mabokela, Rae Paris, Ginny Jones, M uhammad Khalifa, Chezare Warren and Tamara Butler who were not on my committee, but helped to shape my expe riences in completing my dissertation. Whenever I needed help there were certain dependable people who always had answers. Not only did they have the answers, they always help ed me out with a smile. The administrative support I received in the Departme nt of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education was quite remarkable. Thank you Amy Peebles, Terry Edwards, Kristi Lowrie, Linda Brandau and Shawn Rayon. There were also several professors outside of MSU who provided various levels of inspiration, guidance, feedback and encouragement throughout my time in graduate school that I want to acknowledge: Valerie Kinloch, Marianna Souto - Manning, Tim San Pedro, Latrise Johnson, Samantha Caughlan Keisha Green, Jabari Mahiri, Violet Harris, Sonia Nieto, Kris Gutierrez, Marcelle Haddix, Yolanda Sealey Ruiz, Juan Guerra, Elise West, Sophia Villenas, Alana Butler, Bob Fecho, Lamont Flowers, Chance Lewis, Lisa Patel, Anthony Brown, Keffrelyn Brown, David Stovall, Christopher Emdin , Lindsey Dippold, Mindi Thompson and Michelle Boyd. Though she is no longer a professor, I must also acknowledge Kerryann x Rockquemore and her National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD). Because of her endless commitments to supporting graduate students and faculty I w as able to garner the guidance, confidence and skills needed to complete my dissertation. Without the love, technical support, and swapping of resources from other graduate students, finishing my degree would have been a dream. During my time at MSU , I had the honor of being the Senior G raduate S tudent R epresentative o f the American Educational Research Association (AERA). I worked with a stellar team of Division G (Social Contexts of Education) officers in AERA. Thanks to Korina Jocson, Kevin R oxas, Carmen Medina, Bic Ngo, Kevin Carroll and Elizabeth Moje for modeling strong leadership with commitments to social justice and also for valuing the voices of graduates students in our Division. I want to thank my Division G graduate student committ ee members , Adeyanju Odutola, Justin Coles, Taucia Gonzalez, DeMarcus Jenkins, Amanda Sugimoto, Sirad Shirdon, Mary Candace Full, Jon Wargo, Jen Stacy, Eric Felix and the Graduate Student Council (GSC). They worked diligently to meet the needs of graduate students across the country. Their commitments to education strengthened me and helped me to be a better listener and leader. I also served on the Black Graduate Student Association at MSU. Thank you , Patricia Herring Jackson for being a wonderful advi sor and mentor. I want to give a special thanks to my graduate student colleagues who held me accountable, studied with me, read my drafts, listened to my ideas, made me food, picked up medicine when I was sick and so much more - Lorena Gutierrez, Christop her Seals, Bernadette Castillo, Donald Barringer , Nimo Abdi, Dali Martinez, Tonisha Lane, Ashley Johnson, Raven Jones Stanbrough, Amal Ibourke, Davena Jackson, Amber Nicole Johnson, Bella Tirtowalujo, Alan Hastings, Natasha Perez, Theda Gibbs and Ashley Ha nnah. xi T hank you to my family members , spiritual mentor s and closest friends . I would be absolutely lost with you. Cheryl Everett, Ernest Long, Cherene Everett, Keaton Johsnon, Tawana Spriggs, Paul Chavers, Cynthia James, Eddie Everett, Ronald Everett, Anthony Everett, Richard Everett, Garrett Everett, Beverly Joseph, Carolyn Long, Pearly Yelverton, Valencia Williams Church , Yolanda Clarke , Joseph Ratliff, Sean Carter Walter Gibson, Tarsha Gibson, Monique Thomas, Di ana Louis, Abena Sackey Ojetayo, Olurun funmni Ojetayo and Ivy Mccottry . I want to thank you for your prayers, emotional support and love along the way . You keep me grounded and remind me regularly about why I must do this important and difficult work. To God be all the glory! xii PREFACE At first when we were given the directions and instructions , I was stuck. It took some time for me to find the metaphor. I sat back and thought about my life experiences and what not and all the problems I've avoided to be where I am. I realized how I' ve never got caught up in any situations I couldn't get myself out of. So I ran with the fishnet idea and it just flowed. I expressed myself and put a portion of my life story on a piece of paper. I didn't really expect for everyone to be emotionally tou ched by it. But thank you for assigning a 3 - page paper because that's the only reason I expressed myself. I've never put these experiences into my work and I want to thank you for that. (Rajon Thompson 1 , email communication) In the We Ch o ose to Learn (W CL) pre - college summer writing class in which I was the instructor of rising high school seniors, a 17 - year old Black male student, Rajon who was from an urban school district in a Midwestern city, wrote an Artifactual Literacy Education Narrative (referre d to as Artifactual LENs or A LENs). He sent this email to me after submitting his 3 - page A LENs, which was presented to the class. The purpose of this teacher - generated assignment was to encourage my students (referred to as scholars henceforth) to util ize creativity, metaphor, and the skill of narrative to construct initial drafts of their (potential) college admissions essays. Scholars submitted their papers to me electronically via email and I printed a hard copy of each scholar paper for our class p resentations. On each table in our classroom, there were at least three items per scholar. First, there A LENs. Next, there was a plain white sheet of paper with the ed the sheet. Lastly, there was an artifactual metaphor, a physical object that each student selected (or created). A LENs explained the significance of the scholar - selected , artifactual metaphor. As such, the room was set up like an art gallery. Stude nts were encouraged to move about the room freely to read their fellow xiii the artifactual metaphors provided by each scholar. As the aforementioned email written by Rajon suggests, his Artifactual LENs touched several people emotionally. At the time of the presentation, several people clustered around hugs, and others sh ed tears, including Rajon. In short, it was a humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) moment that no one could have anticipated that day in class. I will explain below in an excerpt ow this day unfolded. My reflective memo was written immediately after class that day. The classroom had two separate entrances, one on the northwest end and another on the southeast end of the floor. The entrances to the room were diagonally aligned. I was standing with a group of students at the southeast end of the room when Dr. Johnson 2 (pseudonym) arrived around 10:00am. When she came into my classroom, I wanted her to know what was going on since the art gallery formation was not a typical classro om set - up. As such, I maneuvered the room around the various student workstations to get to her in order to orient her to the classroom set - up. It wasn't until I moved close to her that I realized that she was literally her large black and white suitcase to the side, near the wall, and made a diagonal stride across the room in order to approach Rajon. When she reached him, she grabbed him in a big hug as if her were her own child and spoke into his ear. From my vantage point, I noticed that she hugged him tighter as she held him. They were facing one another and her arms were wrapped around his shoulders - she's a little taller than him. I obviously will never know exactly what she said to him in his ear, but when she let him go I could tell from the look on his face that he was emotionally moved by what she had to say. As such, I also made the diagonal stride across the room to approach Rajon. Dr. Johnson turned to one of the program counselors, Ms. Martin (pseudonym to Ms. Martin. While they talked, I went up to Rajon and grabbed his right arm and kindly guided him outside of the room toward the nort hwest entrance of the classroom, which is near an adjacent office. When we were completely outside the room, I took him into the office area, which was to the left - hand side of the adjacent office. I told Rajon that he was the student that had me up at 1 am in the morning crying as I read through the student papers. I also told him that I really appreciated him for taking a risk with me by putting his personal life out there on paper for our classroom learning community. I emphasized the fact that I knew it was hard to experience what xiv he had experienced. Plus, I knew it was probably equally as hard to write about tough topics for a class paper. At that time, he let me know (again for the second time now) that he had never written a three - page paper befor e. The first time he mentioned this was when I originally assigned the class the project. I went on to explain to him that after reading his paper, I sent a text to Dr. Wallace (pseudonym), the program coordinator to tell her how the paper moved me pers onally because it reminded me a lot about my journey as a first - generation college student. Furthermore, I reactions, if he wanted to come to Success Ticket University (STU) 3 that he was pretty much guaranteed admission. would have to do to get into other colleges, but I was willing to help him with his writing in the best ways that I knew how. started to tear up. I looked at him as he hel d his head down a little. The whole time I spoke up until this moment he was looking me straight in the eye. Therefore, putting his head down was a noticeable physical change in his demeanor. It made me think back to the day in our class when we read Dav id Kirkland's (2012) chapter, Inventing masculinity: Young Black males, literacy, and tears. In class, Rajon mentioned in his written critical reflection (about the chapter) that he The silence between us was so loud and for reasons that I still struggle to articulate, I looked away. I turned back to him and gave him a big strong hug and he hugged me tightly as well. He is taller than me and I could hear him in my ear as he cried in the corner of his I hugged him tighter to let him know that I understood him. After a while, I let him go and then he let me go too. This whole interaction may have been a minute and half of time total, but it seemed much longer than that at the time. looked at me, a nd asked if he could go to the bathroom. I cracked an involuntary small smile and o the bathroom, especially after the humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) interaction we just had. I wo ndered about the significance of his question in the grand scheme of things. I am his teacher and clearly he saw me as an authority figure. At the same tim e, he saw me as someone he could be vulnerable with in his writing and with his tears - something he made explicit as not him leave the room as I pondered my afor ementioned thoughts. He went out the front of the adjacent office door. I think it is significant to note that route was a roundabout way of getting If he had traveled the shortest route to the restroom, this would have meant going back through the room where all of the scholars (classmates), counselors, and Dr. Johnson was located. xv I took a moment to gather myself and I went back into the room. Once I entered the room I work as they described it to their fellow scholars. Rajon and I had our first formal interview after his Artifactual LENs project 4 was submitted to me. When I asked him to explain the content of his A LENs paper he said, , , uh , me hating the fact that I had to grow up how I grew up. I was struggling basically having to get everything for myself a majority of t By now, as a reader , I hope that you are interested in reading excerpts from the A LENs Relatives and close friends all tell me their stories and where they went wro ng in their school situations and not to follow the route they went. means everything to me and if I (Excerpt from A rtifactual . In addition to the 3 - page A rtifactual LENs, each scholar presented an artifactual metaphor to represent the rtifactual the Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo picture , Marlin is on one side of a large fishnet, while the members from his hometown (Great Barrier Reef) are featured on the opposite side of the fishnet. The fishnet symbolized the physical separation that Marlin had to undergo in order to pursue the thing he desired the most. Marlin informed the community members that he needed to leave their hometown in order to search for Nemo (his son), who was abducted. In the movie, Marlin had reason to believe that Nemo had been taken to Sydney, Australia. As Marlin left the community, there was no way for him to anticipate the xvi journey ahead of him. However, his love for his son motivated him to endure the unforeseen risks until he successfully brought Nemo home. rtifactual LENs, Rajon descr ibed how his close family members and friends tried to motivate him to succeed through their stories of struggle. However, when he reflected about his personal struggles with growing up in a single parent , low - income household in an urban community and ho w he intentionally avoided all of the that their stories did not motivate him to be an academically high performing student. Rather, he was motivated to succ people have for young Black men. He also cited research literature in his paper from Gary Orfield (1996) and Gloria Ladson - Billings (1992) about disparities in funding, high school graduation n In other words, he purposefully chose to be an academically high performing Black male s tudent. In this way, tropes about young Black men from urban contexts as violent, lackadaisical, illiterate, non - Rajon actively owned his agency in refusing 1 Rajon Thompson is a student - selected pseudonym of o ne of my research participants (p. xii) 2 Dr. Johnson was the director of the We Chose to Learn (WCL) aca demic enrichment summer program (p. xi ii) xvii 3 Success Ticket University (STU) is a pseudonym (p. xiv) . 4 The Artifactual LENs project is discussed in detail in Chapter 5 (p. xv) . xviii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ................................ ................................ ................................ ....................... xxi LIST OF FIGURES ................................ ................................ ................................ .................... xxii KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS ................................ ................................ ................................ .... xxiii (The Problem) ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 1 The Current Study ................................ ................................ ................................ ....................... 4 Research Questions ................................ ................................ ................................ ..................... 9 Significance and Importance of the Study ................................ ................................ ................ 10 Key Terms ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ . 12 Literature Review) ................................ ................................ ................................ ...................... 14 Young Black Men in U.S. Schools ................................ ................................ ........................... 15 A Closer Look at Academic and Scholar Identities Among Young Black Men in Schools .... 19 Examining Literacy Among Young Black Men ................................ ................................ ....... 32 ........... 41 Methodological Stance ................................ ................................ ................................ .............. 41 Projects in Humanization (PiH) ................................ ................................ ................................ 43 Participatory Action Research (PAR) ................................ ................................ ....................... 46 Critical Ethnographic Case Study (CECS) ................................ ................................ ............... 49 Engaged Pedagogy (EP) ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 51 Overview of Research Design ................................ ................................ ................................ .. 54 Research Context(s) ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 56 Phase I Contexts ................................ ................................ ................................ ........................ 57 We choose to lea rn summer program overview. ................................ ................................ .. 57 Liberty school (elementary school program). ................................ ................................ ....... 59 Phase II Contexts ................................ ................................ ................................ ...................... 60 ................................ ................................ .. 60 ................................ ........................... 61 ................................ ................................ ................ 62 Scholar participants overview profile ................................ ................................ ................... 63 College bound Black young m en ................................ ................................ ......................... 66 Data Collection ................................ ................................ ................................ ......................... 68 Phase I Data Col lection ................................ ................................ ................................ ............. 69 Excerpt of writing course syllabus. ................................ ................................ ....................... 70 - ................................ .......................... 71 Video recorded class sessions and digital observations ................................ ........................ 72 Audio recorded interviews ................................ ................................ ................................ .... 74 Observation notes ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 75 Reflective memos ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 76 xix Phase II Data Collection ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 77 Audio recorded interviews ................................ ................................ ................................ .... 77 Critical narrative analysis ................................ ................................ ................................ ..... 77 Analytic category development ................................ ................................ ............................ 81 Analytic Category 1: Artifactual Literacies Education Narrat ................ 82 Analytic Category 2: Intersectional identities ................................ ................................ ....... 83 CHAPTER 5: Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives - A Catalyst for Unpacking Raced and Gendered Experiences of Academically High Performing Black Male Students ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ ........ 85 Context for Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives (A LENs) ................................ ......... 87 Toward a Theory of Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives (A LENs) ............................ 90 ................................ ................................ .......................... 94 ................................ ................................ ....................... 96 ................................ ...... 98 ................................ ................................ ............................... 100 ................................ ............. 101 ................................ ......................... 102 ................................ ................................ ................................ .......... 105 Investme ............................ 106 Urban schools invest more in surveillance equipment than in scho ol supplies .................. 107 ........................... 109 ................................ ................................ ................................ .... 110 School ................................ ................................ ................................ ... 111 ................................ ................................ ...... 112 ................................ ................................ ...................... 114 ................................ ................................ ........................... 114 Rhetoric of possibility through meritocracy (implications of institutional racism). ........... 117 Comparing and contrasting urban and suburban schools and communities ....................... 118 Oppressive (symbolic) violence and policing in schools and communities ....................... 120 Learning is not equal to edu cation ................................ ................................ ...................... 122 Framing agency: on giving back ................................ ................................ ......................... 122 Proving people wrong and being change agents ................................ ................................ . 123 - Constructing, Negotiating And Embodying Scholar Identities Across Academic Contexts ................................ ................................ ...................... 125 Constructing Identity: On Being Cool, Chilling and Learning ................................ ............... 128 ................................ ........................... 129 ................................ ................................ ............................ 134 ................................ ................................ ................ 136 ........................... 138 Embodying Identity: Activating my Agency ................................ ................................ .......... 141 ................................ ................................ ............................... 142 ................................ ................................ .. 144 ................................ ................................ ................................ ..... 148 ................................ .............. 152 xx Negotiating Identity: Assessing, Confronting and Rationalizing Tensions ............................ 156 ................................ ....................... 156 chedule ................................ ................................ ................................ 159 ................................ ................................ .................. 163 ................................ ................................ ....................... 165 Achieving While Black and Male (Discussion) ................................ ................................ ...... 167 CHAPTER 7: #BlackLivesMatter - (Conclusions, Recommendations, and Reflections) ... 172 Recommendations for Teachers and Teacher Education ................................ ........................ 174 Recommendations for Future Research ................................ ................................ .................. 180 Reflections ................................ ................................ ................................ .............................. 181 An Open Letter of Lo ve to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter ................................ ............ 187 APPENDICES ................................ ................................ ................................ ............................ 190 APPENDIX A Research Participation Information and Assent ................................ ..... 191 APPENDIX B Research Participation Information and Assent ................................ ...... 193 APPENDIX C College of Education Summer Scholars Program Writing Class Syllabus ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ .. 195 APPENDIX D - ........................... 198 APPENDIX E Writing Skills Research Paper ................................ ................................ ... 199 APPENDIX F Sample Semi - Structured Interview Protocol ................................ ............ 200 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................ ................................ ................................ ....................... 202 xxi LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1 We Choose To Learn (WCL) Scholar Profile Overview Data Chart ........................... 65 Table 4.2 We Choose To Learn (WCL) College Bound Scholar Overview Data Char t ............. 68 Table 4.3 Summary of Formal Data Received from Scholars ................................ ...................... 7 4 Table 5.1 Artifactual LEN s Themes and Significance ................................ ................................ . 9 3 Table 6.1 Constructing Identity: On Being Cool, Chilling and Learning Scholar Theme C h art ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 12 9 Table 6.2 Embodying Identity: Activating My Agenc y Scholar Theme Chart .......................... 14 2 Table 6.3 Negotiating Identity: Assessing, Confronting and Rationalizing Tensions Scholar Theme Chart ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 15 6 Table 8.1 Course Schedule ................................ ................................ ................................ ......... 1 96 xxii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. 1 ................................ ......................... 7 Figure 1. 2 ................................ ..... 8 Figure 3.1 Organizing Methodological Framework ................................ ................................ ..... 42 Figure 5.1 Organizing Methodological Frameworks ................................ ................................ .... 9 2 ................................ ................... 9 4 ................................ ....................... 100 ................................ ................................ ... 10 5 ................................ ................................ .. 11 1 Figure 5.6 Shattered Le ns ................................ ................................ ................................ ........... 12 3 xxiii KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS A LENs (Artifactual Literacy Education Narrative) Success Ticket University (STU) We Choose To Learn (WLC) 1 lack M ales F ace M ore B arriers T o A chievement T han O ther S tudents (T he P roblem ) Black males face more barriers to achievement than other racial and gender groups - they are profiled, negatively stereotyped, and feared because of the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of Black males historically and in the media. Those Black males who have managed to achieve academic success have, more than likely, had to overcome a number of obstacles (Henfield, 2012, p. 217). and male. rendered as criminal bodies in ne ed of policing and containment. As such, young Black men are often boxed into severely limited scripts that define what it means to be Black, m ale , and scholarly. More specifically, many doubt the (academic) abilities of academically high performing Black man and they are often perceived as an anomaly (Ferguson, 2001; Henfield, 2012; Kirkland, 2012; Whiting, 2 disrupting single stories people have about young Black men and complicating notions that we have about the identities of these young men. Therefore, I use literacy to investigate critically the ways academically successful Black male students navigate academic spaces. In this way, my resea rch (1) investigates the racialized and gendered literacy experiences of Black males and (2) cultivates authoring opportunities for these students, thereby illuminating the voices of students whose perspectives are often void in research, yet are invaluabl e in preparing teachers to work more effectively with this population. 2 When examining research about young Black men, several scholars note there must be i dentities of Black men as simultaneously raced and gendered beings (Chandler, 2011; Ferguson, 2001; Henfield, 2012; Howard & Flennaugh, 2011; Kirkland, 2012; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Majors & Mancini Billson, 1993; Neal, 2013; Whiting, 2009a, 2009b) becau se being black and male is a unique complex identity that has real consequences for the ways young Black men perceive and are perceived by society. For clarity, scholars warn against attempts to do empirical work about young Black men that does not equally consider race an d gender. That is, neither identity can be understood in isolation of the other because Black masculinity is perceived differently than is White masculinity, Asian masculinity or other racial and ethnic masculinities. Therefore, to not carefully consider this layered and intersectional identity would be irresponsible. Black men (like any other race or gender group) want to be successful. Therefore, Henfield (2012) argues Black men need empathy, compassion, and support to resist negative portrayals of young Black men and stay focused on meeting their goals. While most empirical studies tend to amplify how young Black men fail in schools (Harper, 2010), my research examines the racialized and gendered experiences of academically high performing young Bla ck men from urban and suburban contexts. My research is deliberate about adding to the body of literature that recognizes the assets among young Black men, particularly in education and literacy research. Because of this unapologetic stance, I am intenti onal about leading this dissertation with a narrative of an academically high performing young Black man from one of my classes. We rarely hear from Black men about Black men (Howard, 2008). Therefore, more complete p (Lawrence 3 Lightfoot & Hoffman Davis, 1997; Tieken, 2013) about a young Black man in school. This deliberate move also attempts to humanize education research with and about young Black men. By leading with a narrative I am also choosing not to lead with deficit orientations and statistics about young Black men. This does not mean that I am unaware or disregard the many problematic issues about young Black men in this country. To the contrary, it is because of the disturbing st atistics about young Black men that I am motivated to understand what is actually working with and among academically high performing young Black men in academic settings. n the - Yang, 2014a, p. 227). Equally as important, I want to acknowledge that there are young Black men who exhibit high academic performance in urban classrooms on pu rpose: they believe they are acting within their individualized agency to construct, negotiate, and embody better lives for themselves. The those voices to be h eard. Because we rarely hear from these young men through empirical research, their voices sometimes are doubted and questioned. That is, people (including Black people) question whether it is true that academically high performing young Black men actual ly Ogbu, 1986) just because they deliberately choose to succeed in school. In fact, Perry, Steele, and Hilliard III (2003) in Young, Gifted, and Black: Promotin g High Achievement Among African - American Students argue that to be academically high achieving scholars is an essential and deeply embedded aspect of Black history and culture. Because of the abundance of empirical research and negative popular perceptio ns that emphasize barriers for high academic 4 achievement among young Black men, this study sought to understand, describe, and interpret high performi ng young Black m en. This is and the attitudes associated with that provided a useful framework for whi ch to understand the young men. As I spent more time to the young men in this study , I believe there were three primary types of stories the young men wanted to share (1) (de)humanizing stor ies, (2) meritocratic stories and myths, and (3) refusal stories. I believe these themes were present in all mal conversations, observations and other interactions. The scholars discussed these stories in different ways and I attempt to capture those stories throughout my dissertation. It is my understanding these stories manifested themselves in at least two different ways: through literacy ( C hapter 5) and intersectional identities ( C hapter 6). Overal l, my research makes a deliberate shift away from deficit to anti - deficit orientated research, thereby filling a knowledge gap while also disrupting the single story. The Current Study My study is a longitudinal , cross - context critical ethnographic multipl e - case study. The study beg a n in a summer pre - college education recruitment program at Success Ticket University (STU) with a total of 20 co - ed rising senior high school students from nearby urban communities, including No r thwood, Urbantown and Quahog. W e Ch o ose to Learn (WCL) primarily hosts scholars of color; most scholars are Black and a few are Hispanic. All scholars who participated in this pre - college summer program had at least 3.0 - 4.0 grade point average s ( GPA ) on a 4.0 scale in their respectiv e high schools. Many of the scholars who participated in 5 (males and females) who participated in the summer program were already academically high performing studen ts before my interactions with them. Their GPA a critical ethnographic case study qualitative inquiry , I will should be nuanced. Scholars who participate d in WCL we re not bound within any particular socioeconomic class. That is, some of the scholars c a me from low - income , single - parent homes while others c a me from middle class , dual - of the scholars who participated in the summer program ha d all of their tuition and related fees covered by the university. Their expenses include d travel to and from the summer pr ogram; room and board fees; three meals a day and snacks; all school supplies (such as books, articles, pens, paper, dictionaries, a book bag, and access to a university laptop with wireless internet services); field trips; and any other expenses that came up during the course of the summer was also covered for the duration of the summer program under the auspice of the STU. I find it important to spend time describing the items covered in the summer program because financial stress about school is a hallmark trait of many students who attend schools, especially in urban school districts. for approximately four weeks. In WCL, the students to ok four academic classes; they taught elementary students at a local elementary school; and they participated in various social, academic , and professional development enrichment activities. The four academic classes the scholars took in the summer program were (A) writing, (B) critical examination of urban 6 education, (C) college preparation, and (D) educational leadership. All of the academic course instructors in WCL identified as Black. The instructor for class A wa s a Black female (me). The instructor for class B was a Black male. The same instructor, a Black female, taught courses C and D. The director of WCL was a Black female. Among the 20 scholars registered for the summer program, 16 of the scholars identified as Black and four of the scholars identified as Mexican. Among the Black scholars, there were a total of four male scholars. I asked all four Black male students to participate in this research project and all four scholars willingly agreed to participate in this study. In my initial con tact with the scholars about this research, I was open and honest about wanting to engage in a research project that documented and analyzed the writing and educational experiences of academically high performing young Black men. This is significant becau se of my stance as a humanizing researcher. Humanizing research is about acknowledging and creating experiences helps each of us to be/become more fully huma n. Therefore, I had candid, open conversations with the young men about school, life expectations etc. from the outset of our relationship. I be scholars an d treated them like such. During our time in WCL, I spent most of my days with the students, even when they were not in my writing class. Outside of my writing class, I observed them in other classrooms (a) as students and (b) as teachers. I also attend ed social field trips, professional development, and academic enrichment activities. The environment of the larger pre - college WCL program, as well as my classroom, demonstrated a commitment to providing our scholars with rigorous academic work and enrich ing social experiences. 7 As a writing instructor in the WCL summer program, I was particularly interested in my students. According to Kinloch (2010) writing is a medium through which students can learn to exchange ideas, explain positions, critique perspectives, question v alues, establish points of view (artifactual) literacy functions as a lens or a way to understa nd the meaning - making processes and variations of embodiment of scholar identities among academically high performing young Black men. Literacy is particularly fascinating to me because of the many ways literacy (a nd literacies) have been used over time to liberate and marginalize people of color. In my time with the scholars, I have come to utilize metaphor as a way of capturing our learning. I offer Artifactual Literacy Education Narratives or A LENs for its d ouble meaning as a metaphor. Figure 1. 1 Methodological Framework 8 The scholars indeed wrote Artifactual Literacy Education Narratives (A LENs) while in my writing class in the WCL. At the same time, these writings, their actual artif acts from the 2012), especially in their schools and communities. L ike a corrective eyeglass or contact lens, - - from their perspectives. F igure 1. 2 Methodological Framework LENs o f the scholars described in this dissertation, we can develop a nuanced understanding of the construction, negotiation and embodiment of their intersectional scholarly identities toward 9 young Black man in schools. Consequently, cultivating more complete stories about young Black men is were examined using a - Manning, 2005, 20 14a, 2014b) lens that interrogate d and critique d stories about young Black men. After the WCL , I developed meaningful relationships with the scholars beyond the WCL. For example, Rajon ha d my name saved in his simply to note some of the depth an d breadth of our relationships and some of the ways we came to know and trust one another as we all pursue d higher education. At the time of the submission of this manuscript, all of the scholars were freshmen in college. Research Questions In order to us e an analytic lens that can account for (a) sociocultural contexts, (b) literacy practices, and (c) scholarly identity development, embodiment, and sustainability - three unique elements that are intricately interwoven, I adopt the conception of PiH. PiH p rivileges "the co - construction of knowledge, human agency and voice, diverse perspec tives, moments of vulnerability and acts of listening" (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014, p. 23). Occupying such a stance promotes opportunities to learn with youth about the com plex and dynamic ways they choose to perform in academic spaces. Hence, this research deliberately directs attention to young Black men who we re consciously deciding to perform academically well in school. An intense investigation here will also shed lig ht on some of the macro level systems, social affordances and 10 restraints and institutional circumstances that influenced the high academic achievement of the young Black men in my study. Through this project, I s ought to answer the following questions: I n what ways might artifactual literacies education narratives (A LENs) function as a catalyst for unpacking the educational experiences of academically high performing young Black men? How do these young men (a) construct (define & make sense of), (b) ne gotiate, and (c) embody scholarly identities as raced and gendered beings? Significance and Importance of the Study I worked with the four academically high performing Black male high school students students. There is no shortage of deficient - oriented research about young Black men in schools. , , the statistics about Black male considers those students who are systematic in their attempts to be academically high achieving students. There is much that we can learn from such students. In this work, I am intentiona l in telling own voices. Sometimes those voices are in African American Language or AAL ( Smitherman, 1995; Baker - Bell, 2013). Other times those voices are in Dominant American English or DAE (Paris, 2011). I do not spec ifically take up issues concerning the complexities of language use in this forum. However, I would be remiss to not ies throughout the dissertation, especially in each section of the analytic chapters. Centering their voices offers me multiple opportunities to disrupt single stories. It also evidences the variance in Black male experiences in academic 11 spaces. That is , their stories are nonlinear, complex and multi - voiced (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), which illuminates the depth and dynamism of the human experience in more authentic ways. More specifically, I am interested in documenting the substance of Black lives , es pecially those who are academically successful, forward moving and have important stories to tell. We live in a period in the United States of America where anyone with electricity (e.g. a television, computer or handheld mobile device) can access the liv e uncut raw footage of the deaths of Black men, many of whom are unarmed and die in the hands of those who are supposed to protect and serve them - police officers. At a time filled with undue death and dismal statistics about young Black men , I seek to ac knowledge the Black lives of young men who in some ways achieve academically. At a time in our history when three queer Black women ha d to create the now global has h tag - #BlackLivesMatter (Garza, 2014) and debate about whether or not Black lives actually matter, I am reminded of why I began this work almost a decade ago. My study has two primary phases: Phase I and Phase II . Phase I began in the summer progr am (during the four weeks) and Phase II followed the young men from the summer program into their respective high schools during the 2013 Fall and 2014 Spring academic semesters of their senior year in high school. These young men have been academically h igh performing in their respective high schools, which is what made them eligible for admission into the pre - college summer program. In order to gain nuanced understandings of their academic performances in school, the two phases of my dissertation allowe d me opportunities to learn from the scholars various manifestations across academic spaces. Examining their academic performance across spaces provide d context, evidence, and valuable insights fo r the construction, negotiation and embodiment of scholar identities. While in the schools in Phase II of my study, 12 I observed their classroom interactions, and me t with teachers, administrators and family acce ss helped me to better understand their motivations to be academically high performing students and how they negotiated and navigated the realities associated with being academically high performing Black male students. This work has significant implicati ons for teachers, education researchers and families. Key Term s In an effort to provide clarity for some of the concepts I use throughout the dissertation, I define key terms that guide my thinking. Because we occupy multiple identities simultaneously, it is important to attend to our the underlying assumption of fluidity and the social constructions of racial boundaries (Nasir, 2012; Nasir, McLaughlin, & Jones, 2009). Though I understand race to be socially constructed, I also understand that this constructio n has very real and often negative consequences for young Black men, particularly in urban schools. Yet, the young men in my study have managed to be academically high performing. In what ways have they made sense of, negotiated, and embodied particular identities even when the odds have been stacked against them? Black: young men in this study, who were all born in the U.S. However, at times throughout the dissertation you interchanges occur in order to remain true to and respect the students and scholars that identify 13 According to Dyson and Genishi (2005), a cont ext to both the physical and social fra dehumanizing with youth. It also speaks to the agency that youth have in creating their narratives. In this chapter, I made intentional moves to discuss the problem a t hand, rationale for the study and urgency of the problem I am investigating. That is, young Black men, especially in urban contexts face more barriers to achieve high academic performance. What, if anything, can we learn from these young men who have managed to perform academically well in (sub )urban contexts? In the following chapters, I offer an in - depth review of literature that illustrates the issues concerning young Black men in U.S. schools. T wo crucial findings of my dissertation are (a) metaphor s functioned as a powerful catalyst for unpacking the racialized and gendered literacy identities of the young men, especially in spaces where teachers validated such identities (discussed in C hapter 5), (b) intersectional identities were leveraged to asse rt agency in their academic and non - academic communities (discussed in C hapter 6). These findings deepen our understandings about Black sustain scholarly lit eracy identities among their Black male students. 14 ve F aced C hallenges A nd ve O vercome E very O ne S o F ar (T he L iterature R eview ) How students view themselves as learners is important to consider when trying to promote their achievement identity is not just about grades and performance; it also is about attitudes regarding school and achievement and the decisions students make (Whiting, 2009b, p. 54). In this chapter, I provide a review of literature, which is organized into bins. Those bins are: (1) Black men in U.S. schools, (2) academic and scholar identities, and (3) literacy. These three bins were selected because they address three complex , overlapping intersections of my research interests. As such, it is my intent in this chapter to paint a vivid picture of the current state of Black men in U.S. schools. Laying this founda tion affords me the opportunity to articulate the urgency in exploring scholar identities among young Black men in U.S. schools. It is plausible for the knowledge generated and implications of my research to be applied broadly across content areas. Howev er, it is my Positionality as an English educator that guides me in intentionally grounding this literature review within the context of literacy education research. Hence, the third b in directly addresses literacy. This review of literature was intentional in its specific attention given to empirical and conceptual research studies in education about Black youth, especially Black men in urban contexts. As such, the research reviewed here took place in schools/school settings. These studies were selected because of their sensitivity in addressing stigmas and/or punishments attached to being Black and male in U.S. I privileged those studies that recognized th e complex nexus of race and ge nder for Black men in educatio n. After my systematic identification and analysis of the available relevant literature, I situated my study within the aforementioned 15 discourses concerning academically high performing Black men. In this way, I establish how my study addresses a gap in the existing literature about academically high performing Black men. for my study. Young Black Men in U.S. Schools According to the 2010 U. S. Census Data, th e top five cities where Black people live are: (1) New York, NY, (2) Chicago, IL, (3) Philadelphia, PA, (4) Detroit, MI, and (5) Houston, TX. This is also where most Black men in the U.S. live and go to school. Notice that these are attending high - poverty urban schools, schooling has also served a social reproductive function, often doing more to stratify society based on race and class than to ameliorate group - based public schools in large urban school districts receive inadequate educational opportunities. If all schools assumed that all students were deserving of a colle ge bound curriculum regardless of his or her socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, religious or other identity markers, then education would public school in the U.S. sho uld offer a college bound curriculum (Toldson & Lewis, 2013). However, those of us who come from, work in, and go to battle for students in urban schools , are most familiar with a different story about the educational opportunities in urban contexts. Tha t is, there is an accepted culture of failure in the urban schools, which Black students. (Payne, 2008). The culture of failure is accepted b ecause the grim statistics about urban schools 16 are well known; yet the problems are allowed to persist. Charles Payne (2008) describes how urban schools are overwhelmed with educational policies that are disconnected from the real needs of urban schools. The reality is that approximately 84% of Black public school students are in states that require a high stakes high school graduation test (Toldson & Lewis, 2013). At the same time, these students attend schools where they are 70% more likely to have a c ore content teacher (math, English, social studies, and science) who is not certified to teach in the core content subject area (Toldson & Lewis, 2013). To make matters worse, urban schools are often plagued with the highest attrition rates of teachers, e levated dropout rates, underfunding, and lack of contemporary technologies, emergency administration leadership, and large proportions of novice teachers. Also a large proportion of teachers in urban classrooms are white , monolingual middle class females (Ladson - Billings, 1990; Milner, 2009; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). This often creates racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic differences between students and teachers in ways that often disadvantage young Black men. According to Payne (2008), there is an overreliance on test scores in urban schools. Further, he notes this is particularly problematic because tests do not reflect the whole child and tests do not tell us what we need to know about children in order to help them learn. Instead, high stake s exams only serve as a proxy for actual learning, Payne asserts. Plus, high stakes exams encourage narrow teaching that ultimately decontextualizes the subject matter and the overall learning process. Decontextualized learning makes students see little value or connections between school and their lives (Gutierrez, 2008, 2011; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). Therefore an examination of young Black men in urban contexts is grounded and warranted. Howard and Flennaugh (2011) theorize Black men continue to be one of the most academically marginalized groups of students in U.S. schools. Further, there is no shortage of 17 dismal statistics about young Black men in schools. According to The Urgency of Now Report, 52% of young Black men in the U.S. graduated from h igh school in the 2009/2010 academic school year (Schott Foundation, 2012). The same report also notes the 2009/2010 - graduation cohort was the first cohort that had more than 50% of its students to receive a high school diploma within four years. Approximately 49% of Black men in 2011 in grades 6 - 12 were suspended from school (Harper & Associates, 2014). When young Black men do manage to navigate the educational system, they are still very likely to early childhood education, 2) student centered learning, 3) well - resourced community schools, 4) gifted/talented and advanced placement opportunities and 5) post - secondary attainment opportunities (Schott Foundation, 2012 ). It is also important to note males account for 80% of all suicides among Black youth (Joe, 2006). Black men in U.S. schools have been historically, culturally, socially, and academically marginalized. and male, - risk environme same vein, Alfred Tatum (2005, 2009) argues curricula and educational plans have fallen short of addressing these academic, cultural, emotional, and social needs of young Black men and sustain their attention. Similarly, according to David Kirkland, young Black m en are often 18 Black man is detrimental, especially considering the cli mate concerning high stakes exams in our country. Given the alarming and disconcerting statistics about young Black men in America and its persistence over time, Tyrone Howard (2008) asked an important question, Who Really Cares ? Further, Howard wrote th ere is a glaring absence of the research that includes first - hand, detailed, accounts of African American males about the roles that they believe power, race, and racism play in their educational experiences. Ultimately what is at stake here is that we nee d to pay particular attention to the ways that young Black men are positioned in schools. Closely examining th is complex positioning will enable us to better understand how young Black men come to construct, negotiate, and embody what it means to be a you M teachers who work with young Black men to begin re - imagining classroom instruction in ways that are c ulturally sustaining (Paris, 2012) and affirming for young Black men. Drawing from performativity theory, Kimberly Chandler (2011) helps us to seriously consider the masculinities as communicat ive phenomena. As a result the narrow framework for understanding how Black males negotiate performances of gender has moderated our ability to understand their implications, further solidifying their perception as pathological oppositions to white male he teronormativity (p. 55). Here , Chandler argues there are narrow scripts for Black men and we need more research that carefully considers the ways Black men perform gender as Black men. Being a Black man is a unique identity in itself that should not be considered in opposition to White male heteronormativity. This distinction pushes us toward understanding the need for more diversity in the ways we conceptualize Black male identity performances, particularly in academic settings. In like manner, Kirkla nd (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) deliberately has avoided comparing 19 young Black males to nonblack males in deficient ways. Instead, he theorizes about young Black men . The aforementioned research in this section acknowledges, complicates, and extends conversations about young Black men in affirming ways that school and society often fail to do. As such, I am now in a place to ask, how might I challenge, expand, and c omplicate the ways we talk about young Black men as academic or scholarly? Moreover, how can we re - imagine classroom instruction for young Black men in urban contexts in ways that recognize and cultivate scholar identities? A Closer Look at Academic and S cholar Identities Among Young Black Men in Schools For the African American male, the elementary context is a time in which capitalizing on gifts and talents is critical, especially if these gifts and talents are going to be harnessed and channeled in posi tive and rewarding directions (Bonner & Jennings, 2007). In this section of the literature review, I explore specific empirical studies that have - oriented) and scholarly (academically high performing) identities are construct ed, negotiated, and embodied in school spaces. I have intentionally identified empirical studies that take place in elementary, middle, and high schools as well as in university settings. By doing this, I aim to illustrate a trajectory of young Black men - 16 university settings. You will also note the transdisciplinary nature of the studies presented. That is, the studies come from various fields of inquiry, including African American Studies, Gifted Education , Sociology, Educational Anthropology, Critical Race Studies, Urban Education, and Educational Psychology. In short, the exploration of young Black men in schools is an issue of importance across disciplinary fields. 20 Anne Ferguson (2001), a scholar of Af three - - program. A committ ee of teachers, administrators, and counselors selected children to participate in the PALS. As a member of PALS, Ferguson had opportunities to interview students and adults (teachers, principals, discipline staff, truant officer, school psychologist, soc ial workers, school janitors, parents) in her efforts to help the school better assess punishment interventions strategies for their students. In her work, she was able to help the school notice patterns about who was providing punishment and which studen ts received which type of punishment. Eventually, she focused on 20 Black boys; 10 10 were about her Positionality as being an older Bla ck female conducting research with young Black males, she decided to work with a 12 - year - old student. The student functioned as her key informant and research assistant. One question she sought to answer in the research study was: What does trouble mean fo r the students? Together, they were able to investigate meanings of punishment through an exploration and recognition of the meaning of school rules and the (Ferguson, 2001) . Ferguson (2001) analy zed the interplay between institutional and individual forces facing boys in elementary school. She suggested that cultural sanctions gave life to power and racism in school, produced massive despair, and demonized children (Ferguson, 2001). Therefore, s he created in schools. Ferguson nuances this point by adding that punishment in school had the power to create, shape, and regulate social identities. 21 ces. The young Black men. For example, one teacher in the study pointed at a 10 - year - old Black student because he spent so much time in the age of 10 . This label shaped the way teachers and administrators interacted with him. Undoubtedly, this student knew that his school questioned his ability to succeed and/or predicted his seemingly pre - destined failure. ir identities were constantly redefined by (1) naturally growing older and (2) by the school they attended, which to illuminate the voices of the young men because they were often silenced and invalidated in the school. This silencing and lack of validation is problematic because young Black men provide critical p erspectives about educational experiences (Howard, 2008). Without their input on the meanings and functions of punishment in the construction of their developing identities, how could this school or any school adequately cater to the needs of their Black male students? This is a prime example of how schools and curricula fail to meet the needs of young Black men (Tatum, 2005, 2009). In order to get at some of the critical perspectives that young Black men offer in schools, Ferguson asked each student to pose a question about whatever they wanted to lazy, belligerent, and unsalvageable, could also be respectful, diligent, and responsible in other 22 contexts outside o institutions have in limiting and promoting certain types of Black masculinities for young Black men in schools. Fred Bonner (2005) whose research is grounded in Gifted Education, conducted a qualitative study in Connecticut with 63 middle school students in grades 6 - 8. Approximately 37% percent of those students received free and reduced lunch. As such, a significant proportion of the students came from low - income families. The purpose of his study was to assess the factors that led to successful transitions of giftedness among middle school students (from elementary schools). The findings from his study were categorized into six themes. However, I will only highlight two of th ose findings for purposes of this literature review. transitions into gifted education: (1) self - confidence, (2) intelligence, and (3) determination. According to B academic experiences and their nonacademic encounters in schools (Bonner, 2005, p. 20). Secondly, he learned that among the students, three primary factors did not contribut e to their success: (1) luck, (2) money , and (3) physical attractiveness. The students in his study suggested the random subjective qualities associated with luck, money, and physical attractiveness were factors they lacked control over (Bonner, 2005, p. 21). As such, the students with a strong sense of their personal locus of control were better able to recognize their academic abilities and maintain motivation to pursue their academic goals. According to Bonner, academically gifted students tend to pos sess positive levels of self - perception and an internal, as opposed to external , locust of control. What Bonner failed to address in this study is how those students were able to 23 construct and maintain positive levels of an internal locust of control. Th erefore, the question of how scholarly identities are constructed, negotiated, and maintained still needs to be explored. Several researchers have started to challenge our conceptions of academic achievement, particularly for students of color. Prudence Carter (2005) , a Sociology scholar, focused on her multi - year ethnographic study that both her low - income Black and Latino students had aspirations. Howeve r, those students had limited access to and familiarity with dominant of students in Yonkers, NY, she concluded that students fell into one of three categories : Noncompliant believers believed in education, but they also saw value in their own - school dissonance. In other words, these students may not have performed well in school even though they could do well, if they chose to do so. Cultural mainstreamers embraced dominant cultural practices, ideologies, and acknowledged their own race, but they also tried to portray a neutral race role. Therefore, these students (1) were able to fully embrace achievement ideologies consistent with school and (2) they also performed well on traditional school/academic tasks while downplaying the importance of their race. Lastly, cultural straddlers were the cool kids who also did well in school. They made conscious efforts to hold onto their own cultural codes (demonstrating a positive racial - ethnic identity) and they performed academically well in school. In this way, the cultural ormances in school challenged some scholars who purport that Black students who do well in school feel like they must sacrifice their racial - 24 When scholars claim that Black students who perform academically well in school must sacrifice their racial - ethnic identity, they completely disregard the long history of Black people al., 2003). In other words, being an academically high performing Black student is not and ve and useful for understanding the academic and scholarly - ethnic identity and high academic performance. This language does not adequately capture the agency that young Black students actively utilized in constructed, negotiating, and embodying scholarly identities. Jonathan Gayles is a scholar in African American Studies and Educational Psychology. He studied academic resilience among young Black men in high school. Gayles (2005) in Playing the game and paying the price: Academic achievement among three high - achieving African American males characterized academic achievement as a form o f academic resilience . Academic resilience in the context of his ethnographic , multiple - achievement when such achievement is rare for those facing similar circumstances or within a ll of the students in his study were among the first to graduate with honors and attend college in their families. Yet, these same students diminished the degree to which academic achievement separated them from their peers. More specifically, one studen 255) that one could 25 assume that because these young men performed well in school, they enjoyed school and/or they thought of themselves as somehow different from other young Black men. However, the young Black men in his study made it a point to not distingui sh themselves from their peers, at least not socially and culturally. (2005) study, grades were something the boys needed as opposed to wanted . Grades were not connected with any social enjoyment of school or the learning pro cesses involved. In other words, they played the game (of academia), so they could practical interpretations of academic achievement for young Black men, rather th an think of academic performance as some intrinsic or inherent value. Once again, this study reminds us about the critical value in listening closely to what students are saying and why they are saying it (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014 , p 26 ). If we do complete narrative about th e triumphs and challenges of being an academically high performing embodied scholarly identities were counter - intuitive and very insightful. Gayles suggest s advocates f or culturally relevant pedagogy need to consider the impact of utilitarian constructions of schooling and academic achievement as a strategy to increase student engagement. Dorinda Carter Andrews, a Critical Race and African American Studies scholar , p oints to 26 discourses that focus on Black underachievement in the U.S. by focu sing on Black high Carter Andrews asserts Black achievers can perform well in school and maintain their racial and ethnic identities. School success as a resistan ce strategy represents a commitment to maintaining In this grounded theory study, Carter Andrews (2009) found that Black achiever identities were not monol ithic. Consequently, Black achiever identity constructions may also look different in different contexts. Students in this study were consciously aware of race and racism. Further, the students illuminate an insightful nuance that achievement was a huma n trait, but the task of acquiring academic achievement in their school setting was racialized. The interrelatedness of race and achievement as part of their student identity highlights contradictions in their discussions of achievement in racial and non - racial terms. In other words, having a Black high - achiever identity while maintaining a positive racial - ethnic self - concept was a complex task with many layers. Carter Andrews argues these students did not maintain school success by simply having a stron g self - concept. Indeed, they discussed achieving in the context of being Black or African American. In this way, her student participants valued race as a part of their core concept and expressed positive feelings toward Blacks and members in their own r acial group. In To be young, gifted, African American, and male , Bonner (2003) did a phenomenological case study with two students, one attended a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) and the other young man attended a Traditionally White Institut ion (TWI). In his study, Bonner wanted to learn more about the experiences of Black male students - 12 settings. His findings revealed there 27 were at least six major themes that influenced their educat ional experiences: (1) relationships with faculty, (2) peer relationships, (3) family influence and support, (4) factors influencing college selection, (5) self perception, and (6) institutional environment. He learned that "[r]egardless of factors such a s precollegiate preparedness or intellectual prowess, students at both ends of the academic continuum profit[ed] from meaningful liaisons with faculty" (p. 27). Both students in the study spoke at length about (A) the multifaceted nature of their peer net works and (B) how those relationships were instrumental to them academically, socially, emotionally, and psychosocially, especially since their designation as "high achieving student" sometimes compartmentalized and isolated them from other students. It i s also important to decision making processes. When working with young Black men, we need to recognize that eed to be addressed holistically (Bonner, 2003). This need for Black men in particular to be engaged holistically, regardless if they are academically high or low performing , is consistent across the literature in different fields of inquiry. The ways th at young Black men are positioned in schools and society demand this level of empathy for our Black male students. Greg Wiggan (2009), whose work is situated in Urban Education and Sociology , conducted a mixed methods phenomenological study at an urban public university in the south with seven students (six females and one male). All of the students were Black and attended suburban high schools where they maintained 3.0 grade point averages or higher on a 4.0 scale. The purpose of his study was: (1) to explore the experiences of African American students, (2) understand the processes that contributed to the students school success, (3) and to explain the 28 progress students believe was necessary to improve achievement across the nation (Wiggan, 2009). T (2009) study illustrate that school context and school practices, engaging pedagogy versus disengaging pedagogy (2) participation in extracurricular activities and (3) the state scholarship as performance incentive. Wiggan suggests that academic achievement is generally associated with GPA These measures, he asserts , are - performances are acceptable and that whiteness is the norm (p. 318). He takes this point further to illustrate that on a global scale, whites are underperforming when compared to other countries. As such, Wiggan arg ues for excellence as the standard for achievement, rather than racial standards. In this way, Wiggan challenges us to problematize and reframe our understandings of 2 005) on the standard of measure, we can presumably author different stories about academic performance. In New directions for gifted Black males suffering from bystander effects: A call for upstanders (2011), Grantham theorizes about why we still continue to see alarming statistics about young men and he call s Psychology and Gifted Education. In his 2 011 article, he takes up the concept of "bystander 29 effects," which he argues is born out of social and experimental psychology studies that have examined people's responses to others in a crisis or emergency situation. Bystanders are people who do not re spond if something bad happens; instead they stand by, watch , or pass by (Grantham , 2011, p. 264). Then he lays out five primary reasons why people engage in bystander effect behavior: (1) self - preservation, (2) perceived inability, (3) situation ambiguit y, (4) diffusion of responsibility , and (5) pluralistic ignorance. Next, Grantham explains that these bystander effects negatively impact young Black men in the following ways: (a) people watch intelligent young Black men become over - referred for special education or remain unengaged in class because of culturally biased curriculum, (b) people ignore the aspirations of underprivileged gifted Black men as unrealistic, which later creates long range career barriers, and (c) people allow gifted Black men whos e learning styles might be characterized by movement to underachieve because teachers believe that it is not their responsibility to modify their teaching styles to be more culturally relevant. All too often , Grantham argues, people applaud Black men for their athletic and creative talents (i.e. stepping, dancing etc.), but rarely do we engage their intellectual abilities. As such, he challenges teachers, parents, and Black men to become upstanders . He defines upstanders as "those who take a stand and en gage in proactive roles to address injustices" (p. 267). According to Grantham (2011) , upstanders for gifted Black men can play the following three roles: (1) facilitator, (2) problem solver, and (3) be a communicator. Facilitators bridge gaps between s trengths and weaknesses by providing skill and knowledge d evelopment. Problem solvers overcome barriers to achievement and employ strategies of motivation and perseverance in spite of crisis. Communicators engage in conversations, entertain questions, and exercise listening skills to effectively understand and respond to crises. He also provides several 30 examples of ways that teachers, parents can concretely engage in upstanders behaviors such as developing cultural competence, acquiring accurate informati on about Black males, and using the information to support and guide Black males as they matriculate through school. Overall, Black men and take action to change th e plight of many young Black men. Gilman Whiting, a scholar of African American studies, Masculinity Studies, and Gifted Education cofounded what he calls Scholar Identity Institute (SII). In his SII, he worked with 30 - 70 Black young men from urban cont exts in grades 5 - 10 for two weeks annually. The students in this program range d from academically low performing (.88 on a 4.0 scale) to academically high performing. Some students were formally identified as gifted and talented and took Advanced Placeme nt (AP) courses (Whiting, 2009b). After his third year in these annual summer institutes, Whiting conducted a case study with one his students, Darnell. a sch olar. Subsequently, Darnell chose to underperform, even though he was capable of high academic performance. Whiting points out that scholar identities are not just about grades. Scholar identities are also about attitudes regarding school and achievemen t and the decisions students make (Whiting, 2009b). According to Whiting , there are three underlying assumptions about scholar identity among Black males: (a) they are more likely to achieve academically when they have a scholar identity, (b) they are more likely to be viewed as possessing the potential for giftedness if they achieve at higher levels, and (c) they are more likely to reach their potential when we hold high expectations of them (Whiting, 2009b, p. 54). In addition to high academic performanc e, 31 academicians, as studious, as competent and capable, and as intelligent (Whiting, 2006b). Further, Whiting explains there are nine specific traits that make up a scholar identity: (1) self - efficacy, (2) future orientation, (3) willing to make sacrifices, (4) internal locust of control, (5) self - awareness, (6) strong need for achievement, (7) academic self - confidence, (8) race pride, and (9) masculinity. Because e valuable language to name some observations about academically high performing young Black men, his work fails to demonstrate how these identities become cons tructed, explain how they are negotiated, or detail how they are maintained. My study deals specifically with academically high performing young Black men who choose to do well in school. Young men like Aaronwick, Rajon, Shawn , and Will embody scholar id entities. However, we know very little about how t hese scholar identities came to be or what allows them to persist. Therefore, using a critical ethnographic case study methodological approach that closely investigates scholar identities among young Blac k men , like the scholars in my study , is both appropriate and warranted. young Black man in U.S. schools, especially for students in urban contexts. Further, I h ave laid out several empirical studies across academic disciplines and age groups in ways that demonstrate what we already know about young Black men. Identifying literature systemically in this way, helped to establish the complexities and nuances of inv estigating academic and 32 scholar identities among young Black men. Now, I will address my particular interests in the sociocultural literacies of young Black men. Examining Literacy Among Young Black Men In this section, I offer several definitions of & Blot, 2009) are complex and have long and complicated sociohistorical lineages and varied meanings over time that concern religion, economics, and power. Therefore, I want to highlight some of the scholar s who have been influential in the ways that I am coming to know, understand, and teach literacy/ies. I situate my understandings of literacies within and around sociocultural and New Literacy Studies (NLS). Within these realms , there are several subtlet ies, but they overlap and inform one another in very useful ways. The literacy/ies offered here cater to those students, particularly Black men , who come from urban contexts. The underlying assumption across the definitions is that Black men are literate and scholarly in nature. As such, these literacy/ies understandings inform my research, teaching, and epistemological understandings as a humanizing researcher and educator. Teaching is a social and political act and the roots of "literacy pedagogy [are] - Smith, 2001) and students , as I have demonstrated, are multidimensional beings. In alignment with scholars like Gee (1996), Hill (2009), Kinloch (2010), Mahiri (2008), Paris (2011), I understand literacy as non - stati c and situated within social, political, cultural, and historical contexts. As such, I come to this research with the embody and enact literacy practices are int ricately interwoven with how we identify ourselves and they are difficult to separate. 33 American K - 12 schools in their current form are failing to meet the needs of young Black (Henfield, 2012) of being Black and male in urban school districts. Subsequently, there are not enough actions taken too seriously address how this intersectional identity influences Black s. Kinloch (2009) suggests, students should be encouraged to write powerfully about their (dis)connections to multiple arguments, positions, perspectives, and locations of learning (p. 333). Hence, there is a need to create more - - 2014a, 2014b), and effective critical approaches/programs that actually work for young Black men. In short, there is a need for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education , we need to create a third space ( Gutierrez , 2008) for young Black men. Ernest Morrell (2002, 2004) described literacy in two explicit ways: academic literacy and critical literacy. Academic literacy refers to the forms of engaging with, producing, and talking about texts that have currency in elementary, secondary, and post - secondary schools. Critical literacy (as opposed to academic literacy) is defined as the ability to not only read and write, but also to assess texts in order to understand the relat ionship between power and domination that underlie and inform texts (Morrell, 2002, 2004). Morrell (2004) notes that by nearly every statistical measure (dropout rates, standardized test scores, advanced placement exams and college and eligibility indexes) , urban students, particularly youth of color, appear to trail behind their suburban counterparts. However, he suggests that intelligent and highly motivated young people are often alienated and disempowered by traditional curricula and pedagogical practi ces because many urban students have limited exposure to academic language, topics, and themes addressed in academic texts. 34 Hence, his research critically engages and challenges traditional academic measures of achievement through empowering youth to gain mastery of both academic and critical literacies. In my work with Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon and Will, they expressed verbally and in writing that reading books like Paulo Freire's (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed not only motivated them to perform well in school, but it also gave them a language to describe some of his lived experiences. Jabari Mahiri (2008) subscribes to the New Literacy Studies (NLS), which according to scholars like Gee (2008) suggest that literacy integrates a variety of disciplines like linguistics, social theory, anthropology, critical theory, cognitive science, and education to take on the view that language and literacy must be defined as socially, historically, and politically situated h are formed and transformed, produced and reproduced (Gee, 1990; Mahiri, 2008). Mahiri (2008) would describe academic achievement for particular voices and choices allows us to better understand their anxieties and how they understand their own conditions. This brings us back to the critical value in listening closely to w hat young people are saying and how they are saying it (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). We must we teach in schools are failing to engage youth with the claim that it is not just about literacy development; it is about their lives (p. 31). More specifically, teachers should teach in ways that understand the seriousness of lives being on the line. As such, Tatum argues that literacy development requires skills and strategies to read texts 35 and and define themselves, understand their resiliency, collaborate with others, and build a capacity for change. Later , Tatum and Gue (2012 ) extended this argument by emphasizing there are sociocultural benefits of writing for Black male students who anchor their writing in a collaborative writing environment that they assess as both engaging and supportive. Valerie Kinloch (2010) values acad emic achievement that through writing , allows students the space to exchange ideas, explain positions, critique perspectives, question values, Kinloch (201 0) also blends sociocultural and literacy theories to empower two student participants in her study in Harlem, NY. This three - year , systematic action research endeavor was rooted in the lived experiences of youth, which she notes are often absent from the conversations that adults have about community. Her ethnographic study illuminated the power and writing is a tool, which allow opportunities to exchange ideas , explain positions, critique perspectives, question, values, establish points of view, and reflect on beliefs - shared and contradictory (Kinloch, 2010). The students in her study were able to effectively grapple with a sense of belonging in the midst of literacy encounters in the classroom while encouraging them to take responsibility for their litera cy lives. This study is very useful in that it provides explicit detail about how to conduct 36 this type of research. It also includes student - writing samples, which illustrate the critical thinking, questioning, and changes in the students during the cour se of the study. Kirkland (2009) suggests that Black students, particularly Black men, face academic, social, and political penalties simply for embodying Black language, culture, and identity. Th ese , he claims, position their literacy skills to constan tly be questioned by the general public absence , can be adequately conside red. Kirkland and Jackson (2009) argue for a theory of masculine literacies, one that recognizes how a particular group of Black males formed and functioned literate practices. Their research notes that dominant discourses often depict Black men as lac king literacy and this is a position they strictly oppose. Embedded in this theory of Black masculinities is an understanding that individuals and groups communicate by using more than just words and literacy is situated. Hence, when working with young u rban Black men, they insist that before we can understand a theory of Black masculine literacies, we must first insist that Black men are literate. Furthermore, they argue Black men are multiply literate as evidenced through their language and style, whic h is a deviation from the dominant discourse on Black males as barely literate (p. 295). Kirkland and symbolic systems that defied conventional wisdom; it had its own logic (Kirkland & Jackson, 2009). For example, cool talk was a cultural code that could help shape black male identities. Students felt like what they wore gave particular messages about who they were ; clothes became 37 symbols for composing narrative and critique. Clothes served as an identity text that could not be separated from their physical a nd social contexts (Kirkland & Jackson, 2009). Young (2007) makes th is stream of thoughts explicit by noting "we can't ignore the fact schools (p.144). In his book, Your Average Nigga , Young (2007) discusses some of the tensions Black men contend with in trying to negotiate a balance between being Black enough and being Being recognized as masculine for Black men is a significant part of Black male identity. Further Young argues, participation and performance in classrooms. This, Young asserts , is evident in how traditional reading fluency programs in schools like Hooked on Phonics and Reading Naturally require that all students read texts using audio recordings where they mimic th e sound of a white women's audio recorded voice. Young is careful to note, it is not problematic that students learn to read using fluency audio readings. However, literacy instruction in schools is often associated with a specific gender and race : white females. Young Black men in schools are highly conscious of this fact, especially since they do not embody the valued gender or race utilized in most literacy instructional tools. Clinical Psychologist Beverly Tatum asserts individuals who occupy subord inate positions are highly aware of the values of those individuals in dominant positions (Tatum, 1997). Unfortunately, the result is that "...boys many times feel left out of literacy instruction. When this happens, they can't learn the skills that woul d make them the best readers, speakers, and writers they could be if literacy were more diverse" (Young, 2007, p. 144). According to Tatum and Gue (2012), there are sociocultural benefits of writing for Black male 38 students who anchor their writing in a c ollaborative writing environment that they assess as both engaging and supportive. It is difficult to be (Ferguson, 2001; Henfield, 2012; Kirkland, 2009). They are often unfairly measured against White (male) heteronormativity (Chandler, 2011; Gayles, 2005; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009). Often , their ways of learning and ways of being are not valued or taken into account (Ferguson, 2001; Howard, 2008; Young, 2007). Though these issues are well known, these issues are still allowed to persist (Grantham, 2011; Henfield, 2012; Howard, 2008; Payne, 2008). Additionally, young Black men know some of the consequences of being young, Black, and male beyond school infractions as evidenced by the untimely murders of young Black men like Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice and countless o thers. In short, young Black However, there are young Black men in this coun try who do perform academically well from empirical research. We know much about the issues concerning young Black men, but there is scant empirical researc h about how to change these realities. We know even less about how scholar identities are cultivated, perceived and maintained by young Black men from the perspectives of young Black men. My research seeks to build on the aforementioned research about yo ung Black men in ways that challenge, extend and perhaps transform the status quo in order to provide more complete stories about academically high performing young Black men. 39 s created These single stories go on to produce stereotypes about people. She argued that the issue with stereotypes is not that they are incorrect, but it is that s tereotypes are incomplete. The aforementioned stories about young Black men as deficient, ill adaptive, failure prone, hyper masculine, and violent are incomplete stories. Unfortunately, these incomplete stories have dominated much education research abo ut young Black men; they have become the master - Stefancic, 2001) about young Black men. In other words, my research aims to provide fair, humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014), affirming, and culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012) paradigms for young Black men. According to Paris (2012), culturally sustaining efforts seek to perpetuate, foster, and sustain cultural pluralism in the democratic project of schooling. In my work with young Black men from urban contexts, I have adopted this concept in hopes of exemplifying what culturally sustaining pedagogies (research and practices in the resource tradition) might look like in practice in academic settings. In this cha was able to explicitly situate my study within the larger discourses concerning academically high performing young Black men and demonstrate how my study addresses a gap in th e existing literature about academically high performing Black men. In chapters three and four, I theoretical framework for entering my study. Reframing the p icture about young Black men in ways that actually include young Black men will deepen and widen our understandings about young men in generative and transformative ways. 40 Furthermore, I came to discover the scholars also revealed three types of thematic stories that complicated their scholar identities. Understanding what informed their (de)humanizing stories, (myths of) meritocracy stories, and refusal stories help us t o cultivate more complete stories about young Black men and disrupt single stories about them. 41 hanging T he P erson W ho I W as ethodological F rameworks ) [R]esearch is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity t hat has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). Methodological Stance have deeply disturbing and disrespectful roots in dehumanizing people. I often wonder about the ways that I am located in research and I also contemplate about the ways I am implicated because of my research. Undoubtedly, I carry out the roles and responsibilities of a researcher in methodologically competent and rigorous ways. But because of my care for young people, especially those often from marginalized populations , it has been important to me to foreground my teacher - scholar identity in my research. I care deeply about the experiences and stories of high performing , Black youth in urban contexts. I too was an academically high performing Black female student in N ew York C ity , youth in ways that a re very close to my heart. Working and learning with this population helps to disseminate stories about Black youth that are often unknown and/or silenced in the academy. As a doctoral student , I have the privilege of working with these communities and t tasked with making decisions about how my communities are [re]presented. In this way, I am This is a huge undertaking that requires many difficul 2011a, 2011b) as guiding principles. Because I come from similar communities to the ones I am 42 In a recent Sky pe conversation with Dr. Jason Irizarry, he suggested that we work researchers. T herefore, I adopt a humanizing research (Paris & Winn, 2014) stance in the research that I do with youth. Adopting such a stance is the best way that I can attend to the from wh ich I research and write about. In this chapter, I discuss the four organizing methodological frameworks that guided my dissertation study. Those four organizing frameworks are: (1) Projects in Humanization or PiH, (2) Participatory Action Resear ch or PAR, (3) critical ethnographic case study or CECS and Engaged Pedagogy (EP). PiH guide my thinking as I engage in CECS. Employing tenets of PAR can be accurately captured through CECS methods and methodologies. See Figure 3.1 Figure 3.1 Organizing Methodological Framework 43 Projects in Humanization (PiH) Projects in Humanization (PiH) are "grounded in acts of listening that situate us as researchers, advocates, and humans who work with, and not for, each other and other people" (p. 26, Kinloch & San Pedro). Projects in Humanization or (PiH) is the first of four organizing methodological frameworks that inform s my orientation to education research with young people. In order to or both researchers and participants, Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) assert that we must privilege "the co - construction of knowledge, human agency and voice, diverse perspectives, moments of vulnerability, and acts of listening" (p. 23). This requires us to re - frame traditional positivist notions of conducting empirical research with htin, 1981) ways. That is, people who are engaged in dialogic conversations actively listen to one another and ask follow up questions that push the conversation in ways that generate new ideas and new understandings. Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) remind us that listening goes beyond hearing words in the air. Rather, they posit: - closely and carefully - to what young people are saying, and how and f or what reasons they are saying it... listening requires us to be attentive to people's utterances, voices, vulnerabilities, body language, lived conditions, backgrounds, and ways of being in the world. (p. 26). To illustrate this point, I return to a dialogic exchange between Rajon and I in the demo - lab in the middle of his class presentation. 5 After I mentioned to him that with a powerful story like e was certainly listening to my comments intently. His body language and tears demonstrated that he listened and understood 44 the seriousness of my comment. Further, the context of the situation and his lived experiences created a moment of vulnerability. This was not an anticipated event that could be accounted for dich otomous categories of researcher versus participant to researcher - as - participant - listener - as - learner - as - advocate" (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014 , p. 28 ). Positioning myself as a researcher/participant/listener/learner/advocate feels more true to who I am, my values, and how I think about research. The email written by Rajon (written after my comments in the demo - lab) facilitated a and San Pedro (2014), a dialogic spiral is the construction of a conversation between two or more people whereby the dialogic process of listening and speaking co - create an area of trust between reveals vulne rabilities and feelings (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). In the case of my student, educational life that he had never written about before. Writing about those experience s and expressing himself began a spiral of written, verbal, and involuntary emotional responses (i.e. crying) internally as well as externally from his fellow classmates and the administrative staff in our program. he longest paper he had ever written. At the time, I was very shocked to learn this information. I used his initial reaction to the assignment as an entry point for conversations about the ways assignments can and do bring certain pieces of our vulnerabi lity to the table in transformative ways. Through this academic literacy (Morrell, 45 2008) we were able to engage and cultivate his critical literacy (Morrell, 2008). I understood , in a particularly powerful way , ity in his pursuit of high academic performance. Instead of attacking the way he articulated himself in the email, my ideas flow, I also helped him to prepar e for academic college writing. By engaging in a - A LENs project. The act of having this young man speak to his experience while asserting agency to author his own text in meaningful ways is the type of work that I value as a teacher, teacher educator, education researcher, mentor, and friend. My research in education seeks to cultivate authoring - 10) lens. concerns of people , dialogic spirals and vulnerable moments with young people in colla borative and transformative such, Kinloch and Undeniably, I am a r esearcher who gathers data and makes claims about findings in my writing. At the same time, I also understand that my relationships with my student participants extend beyond this research endeavor. I am also a mentor and friend. Furthermore, I do not t each or work with young people only because I am researcher. As such, my current 46 work with young people can best be described as a Project in Humanization that utilizes tenets of Participatory Action Research, Critical Ethnographic Case Study , and Engaged Pedagogy. Participatory Action Research (PAR) [Participatory Action Research] PAR is an empirical research methodology in which representatives of the focus population(s) participate as co - researchers. PAR projects utilize qualitative, quantitative, and/ or less traditional data collection and analysis methods. PAR has an explicit goal of "action" over intervention into the problems being studied. (Irizarry & Brown, 2014, p. 64). Participatory Action Research (PAR) is the second methodological framework that informs my orientation into research with young people. According Irizarry and Brown (2014), PAR directly addresses the "theory - are most directly affected by systems of inequality to crit ically understand their conditions and be a part of the problem solving process (p. 66). Inspired by the work of Paulo Freire, researchers in the PAR tradition presuppose that local people possess expert knowledge about the conditions of their lives that outsiders cannot access on their own (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Duncan - Andrade, 2008; Freire, 1970; Irizarry & Brown, 2014; McIntyre, 2000; Morrell, 2004; Terry, 2010). In my work with academically high performing Black male youth, we (my student participan ts or co - researchers) employ tenets of PAR. According to Terry (2010), PAR de - and relevant and invites students to forefront what they find important. McIntyre (2000) suggests that PAR has three guidin g principles: (1) the collective investigation of a problem, (2) the investigation leans on local ways of knowing and understanding , and (3) the ultimate goal of taking individual and/or collective action to address the problem. Because of my understandin gs about the gap in knowledge concerning academically high performing young Black men, my students actively help me to engage in tenets of PAR. More specifically, we investigate issues 47 together in ways that privilege local ways of knowing and understandin g. Then, we collectively construct an action plan to address the barriers that young Black men face in academic achievement. With this in mind, participants in my study have opportunities to co - construct out their realities (from their own perspectives), a perspective that is often missing from current research paradigms about Black men in education. In this way, PAR promotes counternarratives . The purpose of Theory (CRT) is to present alternative perspectives experiences and realities of the oppressed (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Taylor, Gillborn, & Ladson - Billings, 2007). A ction is at the heart of PAR work. Action can take shape in a variety of ways such as - What is key to note about PAR oriented action is that it must be authentic and relevant to the communicating (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Duncan - Andrade, 2008; Freire, 1970; Irizarry & Brown, 2014; McIntyre, 2000; Morrell, 2004; Terry, 2010). In these ways, PAR methodology is humanizing research, creating a space in which individuals and communities can work together collaboratively toward more fully realizing their human potential (Irizarry & Brown, 2014, p. 65). Therefore, having the youth I w ork with as co - constructors in the research process assures In my writing class, Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon , and Will read several college - level texts. Pedagogy of t he Oppressed , transformed their thinking about teaching and learning. To illustrate this point, I offer an example from one of my school 48 visits to Quahog High School; 6 Rajon carried the orange book in his book bag. The fact that Rajon carried the reading with him months after the summer program ended, speaks to the impact of this critical reading in his life. The following description of my visit demonstrates this point. During my visit, I asked Rajon how he was doing in school. He complained that sc hool He then took his book bag off of his back and pulled out the Pedagogy of the Oppressed , which was ear marked on page 73. On page 73, Freire provides a bulleted list of the tra education. As Rajon pointed at the words on the page, my face revealed shock as I audibly office where we had a follow up inte rview that day. He looked at me and laughed also. This example demonstrates how providing Rajon with critical theory gave him language to articulate his experiences in school. This is a clear benefit of what Morrell (2002; 2004) describ ed when we expose A moment later, Rajon went back into his book bag where he carried the entire binder of other seminal critical readings I gave him months before in my summer writing course. When I asked him why he carried the binde - share with Rajon about my plans to influence teacher education through my work as a teacher educator and education researcher. Rajon volunteered to hel some of my undergraduate pre - service students about how to meet the needs of young Black men in the classroom, thereby crossing boundaries (Kinloch, 2012) in teaching a nd learning. Afterward, he also told me about a project that he was starting at his school - an academic 49 discuss the process of starting an academic club. More s pecifically, we discussed the proposal writing process (an academic writing process). He even mentioned that he would use part of his essay from our summer writing class to help get his proposal off the ground. In this dialogic spiral Rajon and I engaged did not come to Rajon with a ridged pre - packaged seemingly objective agenda about what we wou ld accomplish that day. Rather, we co - constructed something meaningful for the community , is that I listened to his concerns and he listened to me too. We both were able to get something valuable out of our e xchange in ways that pushed this PiH, I continue d to work with Rajon and other young men to investigate problems, privilege local ways of knowing and understanding, and take action to address the problems. Critical Ethnographic Case Study (CECS) In deeming research critical, it is thus important to look closely and listen carefully in order to understand the perspectives and experiences of participants in their own te rms rather than superimposing our own perspectives of what is problematic and needs to be transformed (Souto - Manning 2014, p. 201). 973) about why things exist they way they do. Traditional cultural anthropologist s try to make sense of and ascribe meaning to various cultural phenomena. Ethnography without a critical lens may involve a person going to a foreign or unknown community to describe and make attempts to understand the culture. Conclusions could be , those 50 conclusions are shared widely among and across academic disciplines in ways that do not cr itically challenge the validity or accuracy of the descriptions and presuppositions that inform inquiry is colonizing and dehumanizing. More importantly, it robs peopl e of their voices in the stories that get told about them. I reject this type of ethnographic inquiry and instead engage in critical ethnographic case study inquiry. Critical ethnographic case study relies on qualitative methods and interpretation of data (Jocson, 2014). Further, Jocson asserts that CECS is also interested in creating generative spaces (both physical and social) where teaching and learning is co - constructed among research participants, thereby creating a new set of shared experiences and knowledge(s). Ethnographic inquiry affords opportunities for layered meanings and representations of those meanings. methodology of possibility. Critical ethnographic work does not try to hide behind the mask of supposed er Positionality (Fine, Weis, Weseen, & Wong, 2000; Jocson, 2014; Madison, 2005). I utilize critical ethnographic case study in my research because I am equally interested in what we can learn about academically high performing young Black men as individu als as I am interested in the patterns among and between them. That is, I am interested in variations and similarities in their experiences and practices. These understandings deepen our abilities to better prepare teachers to recognize, cultivate, and s ustain scholarly identities among their Black male students. In this chapter, I have provided a lens into my methodological stance in my research with youth. 51 You have also learned about the four organizing methodological frameworks that guide my thinkin g as I enter into research. Engaged Pedagogy (EP) In my classroom, I adopt an engaged pedagogical (EP) stance. This concept is adopted from bell hooks' (1994) Teaching to Transgress book. It is important to me that my classroom is a space where students feel safe in developing ideas and have the support in using their literacies that capture their whole selves. When I designed my summer writing course for the scholars, I was intentional to change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the uni que elements in a classroom" (hooks, 1994, p. 11). In other words, enacting engaged pedagogy speaks to the ways I co - construct knowledge with the scholars. On critically conscious research: Approaches to language and literacy also captures what I attempt ed to do with my students: "Kincheloe (2 004) maintains that critical pedagogy is grounded on social and educational vision of justice and equality, constructed on the belief that education is inherently political, and dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering" as cited in (Willis, 2008 , p. 43 ). Because I am sensitive to the ways young men are often constructed in schools, especially in urban contexts creating this Artifactual LENs assignment is deliberately grounded in both critical and engaged pedagogy. Through this assignment , I hoped the young men could begin to explore parts of themselves that traditional classroom spaces are not always open to receive and value. them theories, readings, and writing assignments in my classroom. E xposing the students to critical 52 theories and believing they had the capacity to read and wr ite with critical comprehension, created an important space within my classroom and the larger WCL program. I entered into our let them know they could brin g their whole selves to the classroom and I tried my best to affirm their ways of being. Like hooks (1994) , I believe: "[t]o believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of students. To t each in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin." (p. 13). I entered into this work with both frustration and excitemen t about teaching and learning. I was frustrated that I had gone through five years of undergraduate studies, obtained two degrees, taught for two years , and had never been exposed to certain readings. For example, I had never read or learned about critica l theories in education. Furthermore, I had not read more than a handful of articles and books written by and about Black people in ways that promoted a course or professional development session that I engaged with over the years, I was almost certain that I would gain no exposure to learn more about myself or how to disrupt singular stories about people like me. For most of my educational experiences, students ingested information and regurgitated it back on exams and in class essays. Freire (1970) would refer to I was always an inquisitive learner, even as a child. However, my efforts to question the world around me wer e sometimes punished. I learned how to disconnect from school, even though I was "good" at it because schools did no t recognize my intersectional complexities and did no t affirm me. Therefore, after my first year in graduate school , I designed a writing 53 curriculum for high school students in an academic enrichment program with several goals in mind to provide the types of affirming and critically engaging experiences I mainly received in graduate school. I wanted my scholars who participated in WCL to (a ) wrap up high school and enter college with a set of theoretical and practical tools to affirm their identities and (b) jumpstart their critical thinking in new and interesting ways. I found that when I exposed my students to readings (that I only read f or the first time as a graduate student), they engaged actively in reading and writing processes in ways that demonstrated their thirst and excitement for learning. This ignited an excitement in me that I have not been able to extinguish. My scholars ama ze me and their strengths and struggles sustain me. Further, when my students saw and experienced my love for them and their sensibilities, they worked hard to raise the bar for themselves. For three summers , I worked to enhance the writing curriculum an d elevate the standard s for my scholars. As I read insightful theor ies in my doctoral courses and personal research, I added these readings to the summer writing curriculum. The scholars not only read these readings, but they wrote and dialoged critically about these texts in transformative ways. 5 See the foreword for the story about Rajon in the demo - lab (p. 43) . 6 Quahog High School is a student - generated pseudonym of his high school and hometown (p. 48) . 54 C HAPTER 4: Methods ) "Ethnography and its methods are among the most comprehensive and rigorous approaches in the constellation of possibilities in the research galaxy" (Kirklan d, 2014, p. 180). In the previous chapter, I discussed the four methodological frameworks that inform the methods and tools I utilized in my dissertation study. This chapter focuses explicitly on the design, methods, and analyses. The design, methods, and analyses are all informed by the initial data gathered and preliminary analyses from the four scholars. As such, this chapter aims to provide a clear sense of how the research ques tions are connected to the research design, data methods, and analyses. In this way, t wo specific research questions raised in C hapter 1. Now I will remind you of the research questions that were introduced in C hapter 1. In what ways might artifactual literacies education narratives (A LENs) function as a catalyst for unpacking the educational experiences of academically high performing young Black men? How d o these young men (a) construct (define & make sense of), (b) negotiate, and (c) embody scholarly identities as raced and gendered beings? Overview of Research Design This study focuse d on how four academically high performing young Black men from high thr ee urban high schools (across three Midwestern cities) engage in authoring texts and phases: Phase I and Phase II (discussed in detail in the next section). Inform ed by a sociocultural theory, my research s ought 55 Wenger, 1991) of the scholars I work ed with and it also uses literacy as lens (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Heath & Street, 2008; Kinloch, 2010; Kinloch, 201 2; Kirkland, 2013) to understand how were revealed in and across academic spaces. The review of the literature suggest ed the most effective ways to understand and disrupt contexts is through rigorous and nuanced qualitative interpretative methods. Therefore, I employ ed a critical e thnographic case study. According to David Kirkland (2014), "... the goal of ethnography is not to generalize to large populations, nor to provide a cure - all for big or even basic societal problems. Rather, it is to upset this unidirectionality of terse scientific pursuits, offering complementary and sometimes contradictory information complicating the body politic of large "generalizable" findings... ethnography allows us to see what lives beneath the skin of large, complex, and living things. Ethnogra as opposed to the universal, of the culturally specific as opposed to the socially general" (p. 181). Kirkland asserts that ethnography , in its very nature , affords the ethnographer opportunities to Street, 2008) about people. Furthermore, according to Dyson and Genishi (2005), qualitative worlds" (p. 18) from their own perspectives. Given that we rarely hear from young Black males about young Black males (Howard, 2001, 2008), especially academically high performing young Black males, critical ethnographic case study inquiry was both approp riate and necessary for this empirical endeavor. from the perspective of the it involved 56 decentering the master narratives about young Black men and focusing on the learning curriculum functions as a more complete narrative. By closely examining the learning curriculum of the se youth, I disrupt ed contexts as monolithically unsuccessful in schools. Research Context(s) My dissertation study happened across several contexts. It is important to note that when I started my study in WCL at STU, I was unaware which students would end up in my summer writing class. Furthermore, I did n o t know who would agree to participate in the study. Therefore, I could not anticipate where my study would take me during the academic year. I orig inally set out to study academically high performing young Black men from urban contexts. In my previous two years of working in the WCL summer program as the writing instructor , most of my students were from urban contexts. However, during the summer of my dissertation study (2013), the four Black males who were in my class came from both urban and suburban contexts. Aaronwick live d in and attend ed a suburban middle class predominately White high school. However, Rajon, Shawn and Will lived in and atte nded urban low income predominantly Black and Latino schools. My transition from WCL at STU into the three different school districts was very interesting and exciting for me. Learning with the scholars across contexts helped me to deepen my understan dings of who the scholars were and what types of environments facilitated their development. During my time with the scholars , I met their principals, administrators, teachers, parents, friends, and girlfriends. I was gifted with the opportunity to sit i n some of their classrooms and observe them. I even had an opportunity to spend time with them at some of their favorite food venues (sometimes during or after school). This involved impromptu 57 neighborhood tours of their communities too. I learned so mu ch from these scholars and I am extremely appreciative. As such, I will provide an overview of the sites involved in my study. Phase I Contexts We choose to learn summer program overview. Because of the cross - context and longitudinal nature of the study, the background inspiration for his Artifactual ways school in urban communities operated to oppress Black and Latino students from low - income neighborhoods. I have adopted his voice in this case to name the chapter because I want important to have a layered approach in research design, methods and analy sis. Within this research , I was - participant - listener - advocate" (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). To be specific, I was the writing course instructor (one of four academic courses) offered in the WCL pre college summer program. The WCL pre - college summer program is offered to 20 rising high school seniors from three Midwestern cities at Success Ticket University (STU). Among the 20 students registered for the WCL summer program, sixteen of the students identif ied as Black and four of th e students identif ied as Mexican. Among the Black students, there were a total of four male students. I asked all four Black male students to participate in my research study. Therefore, I engage d 2011), which is often utilized among teachers who study students in their own classrooms. As participants in the summer pre - college program, the scholars were housed in the - August 2013. In this program , the students took four academic classes; they taught elementary students at a local elementary school; and they participated in various social, academic and professional 58 development enrichment activities. The four academic classes the students took in the summ er program we re (A) writing, (B) critical examination of urban education, (C) college preparation, and (D) educational leadership. All of the academic course instructors identified as Black and biracial. The instructor for class A wa s a Black female (me) . The instructor for class B wa s a biracial (Black and White) male. The same instructor, a Black female, taught the last two courses. This wa s a longitudinal , cross - context study with two primary phases. Therefore, my methodological approach wa s layered across these two contexts. Phase I began in a pre - college residential university - sponsored summer enrichment program, where I was the writing instructor for the student participants. I developed and implemented the writing course curriculum for rising seniors in high school from urban schools, with the following aims in mind: expose students to college level texts (e.g. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire), cultivate college level academic writing, develop scholarly research skills, increa se college readiness, and nurture careers in education. Many of the readings were readings that I came across in my doctoral courses. Phase II followed the young men from the summer enrichment program into their respective urban high schools during the a cademic school year, which spanned across three different school districts in the Midwest. The first phase ( Phase I ) took place during the summer program during July and August 2013 . The next phase ( Phase II ) took place after the students le ft the WCL sum mer program. I now discuss the environment of Phase I of the research design and data collection processes. During the time of the program, I spent most of my days with the students, even when they were not in my writing class. More specifically, I obse rved them in other classrooms (a) as students and (b) as teachers. I also attended social field trips and professional development and academic 59 enrichment activities. The environment of the larger pre - college program, as well as my classroom, was committ ed to providing our scholars , ( how we refer to the students for the duration of the program ) with rigorous academic work and enriching social experiences. epi s them opportunities to (re)position themselves as competent and valued (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) in the summer program. In other words, the summer program aims to provide a positive social and ac are supported and respected. Liberty s chool ( e lementary s chool p rogram). A unique component of the WCL pre - college program was that each student in the program went to a local elementary school program, Liberty School, where they led literacy - oriented activities. The scholars worked in teaching teams of four students. For example, the students read books with the elementary students and came up with various activities various texts. I was able to be a part of some of their lesson planning sessions as well as the executions of those lessons. When I observed them in other classrooms as students, I took notes in e ither my notes or on my cell phone. The content of my notes were similar in nature to when I observed the students in other academic courses as students. There were three particularly interesting features of observing the scholars as teachers. That is, I was able to hear their meta - thinking behind choosing particular activities. This helped me to better understand how they made sense of classroom engagement and the creativity they used to do so. Secondly, I was able to see some of their lessons in act ion. This helped me to understand the ways the students dealt with younger people and their personal values. The 60 scholars really wanted the elementary students to learn and grow to become better students. Because the scholars were academically high perf orming students, they had high expectations for the elementary students. In cases when they felt like the elementary students were not getting a particular aspect of the lesson, they went to great lengths to make sure they helped the elementary students t o master content. Since the scholars worked in teaching teams, I observed individual scholars take elementary students to the side to explain assignments in ways that particular elementary student could understand. The scholars received compliments from the school leaders for their intricate and sophisticated levels of detail in lesson planning and execution with the elementary students. This encouraged the scholars to continue and strengthen their work with the elementary students. My initial observat ions of the scholars as teachers are mentioned here to provide glimpses of the different ways these young men embodied scholar identities. Further, they offer counternarratives about of the young men. Phase II Contexts school). Aaronwick was 16 - year - old senior in high school during the 2013 - 2014 academic school when I did my follow up interviews. As I arrived to the neighborhood, I noticed beautiful brick houses with two car garages, well - manicured lawns, luxury vehicl es, and fancy streets with speed bumps. Along the streets, some people were walking their dogs. Others were jogging near the golf course. As I walked up the school, there were colorful flowers and plants near the entrance of school. When I entered the parking lot of the school, I noticed there were multiple brick buildings associated with the school. It reminded me of a college campus. A security guard guarded the entrance of the parking lot. He asked who I was and what the nature of my visit was. I explained that I was 61 from STU and was here to visit with a student. He then pointed me to the direction of available parking spaces for visitors. There were probably hundreds of parking spaces in the large parking lot. Most were designated for students and some of the spaces were assigned to the administrators and teachers. When I walked into the main building of the school, I asked a student walking by to direct me to the main office. The young White male student gladly pointed me in the direction o f the main office. Upon entry to the main office, there were two middle - aged White females sitting at the front desk. They both greeted me. One of the women asked how she could help me. Once again, I explain the nature of my visit. She looked up Aaron out what class he was in at the time. She said that he had lunch in a few minutes and wanted to know if I wanted to meet him in the library upstairs. I said sure and asked for the visitor book. Afterward she provided me with directions to get to the library, which was on the second floor. I walked along the hallways and glanced in the classrooms along the way. According to the , the student population was 70% White, 20% Black, and 10% Asian. Urbantown chool). Shawn and Will both attended Urbantown high school and they also lived in the same neighborhood in Urbantown. Their school was 98% Black male (single sex school). The area immediately surrounding the school was a low - income area and featured several abandoned building s and vacant parking lots. The school was situated o n the corner of a dead end block. The building itself was not ma rked with Urbantown on the building. As such, I was unsure whether I arrived at the right location. The school had flags hanging outside of the building, which featured the name of an elementary school. I walked around building to find an entry point in to the school. The first door that I 62 walked up to was locked, leaving me unable to enter. I noticed an intercom with a bell on it, so I pressed it and said that I was here to visit students from Urbantown High School and asked if I was in the right locat ion. The seemingly female voice on the other end of the intercom told me that I was in the right place, but on the wrong side of the building. As she spoke, I noticed the camera that looked me in the face. I knew that she could see me, but I was unable to see her. She provided instructions for me to leave the current door and walk around to the back of the school, which is where Urbantown High School was. I was the Urbantown Elementary School entrance to the building. When I walked around to the Urb antown High School side of the building, the door was locked as well. Therefore, I pressed the nearby intercom. The seemingly male voice on the other end of the intercom asked who I was. I explained who I was and why I was at the building. Afterward , t he security guard pressed the intercom button giving me clearance to enter the building. I pulled the door open and walked inside. Once I was inside of the building, the security guard (a middle age d Black male) asked me to sign in the guest book and to put my things through the nearby scanner belt. As I leaned down to sign the book, I noticed several television screens with security or surveillance footage, which monitored various angles of the outside and inside of the building. After walking through the metal detector and receiving my bags on the other end of the scanner belt , the security guard handed me a name badge and directed me to the main office. In the main office , the administrative assistant asked who I was and the nature of my visit. I re sponded accordingly. She called the Will and Shawn down to the main office to meet me. At the time of our interview, Rajon was a 17 - year - old Black male who attended an urban co - educational high school in Quahog (pseud onym). 63 He was a senior in high school during my on - site high school visits for follow up interviews. diverse population of Latino/a and White students over the last three years. The school 77% Black, 13% Hispanic. Further, 86% of the students were eligible for free and reduced lunch. Though Rajon was eligible for free lunch, he refused t he the vending machines located throughout the school. The students were allowed to leave the school for lunch and I often took Rajon to the local McDona iHop during my visits to make sure he at e a meal. as an improvement school on the verge of re - constitution. However, for his senior year the school had improved its test scores and lost the label of an improve ment school. One of the - expressed goal written in the main office of the building and was also evidenced by college/university flags hanging in the halls in front of classrooms. Rajon shared that his college counselor received incentives for getting students to apply to colleges and universities throughout the nation. He applied to over 20 colleges and universities to make sure that his college counselor received Though Will, Shawn, and Rajon attended schools in urban communities , I had vastly most similar, even though they were situated within different contexts. Scholar p articipants o verview p rofile . There were four young Black men in the summer 2013 cohort program at STU. All four Black males were rising seniors in high school 64 and participated in all aspects of the summer program and my research. Three of the four scholars were 17 years old when I first met them and the last scholar (Aaronwick) was 16 years old. Each young man volunteered to be interviewed and allowed me opportunities to visit them in their respect ive high schools during the 2013 - 2014 academic school year (the summer after the WCL program). In other words, I spent time with the young men during their transition summer from 11 th grade to 12 th grade and I followed up with each young man during their 12 th grade year high school. During their senior year in high school , the young men took classes, participated in various extra - curricular activities, and applied to college and for scholarships. Further, most of the scholars turned 18 years old, there - visit this last point in the C hapter 6, which emphasizes the identities of the young men. Three of the four young men lived in and attend schools in urban communities. One of the young men lived in and attended a scho ol in a suburban community. Part of the process was to complicate the narrative about what count ed and for whom . Prior to entering WCL, each young man in the study had at least a 3.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale in his respective school district . Because the young men came from different cities and attended schools in different school districts , school. Furthermore, the rigor of the content within each school counted differently. In other w o rds, these scales are not balanced and there is not an adequate system to account for these differe nces. Each scholar reported experiences of standard measure of assessment that I ha d for the young men was their ACT scores. The highest 65 score that one can score on the ACT exam is a 36. Please see Table 4.1 t hat captures the overview of the scholars in a chart format. Table 4.1 We Choose To Learn (WCL) Scholar Profile Overview Data Chart Scholar Aaronwick Munn Rajon Thompson Shawn Alexander Will Allen Age 16 17 17 17 School Type Suburban Urban Urban Urban High School Name Northwood High School Quahog High School Urbantown High School Urbantow n High School ACT 22 22 32 23 GPA @ Start of WCL 3.0 3.3 3.68 3.9 ALEN Essay Title You Lose It Up in Life Incarcerated Students Build Your Education Household Adults Mother & Stepdad Mother Mother & Stepdad Mother Siblings Little brother Older brothers Younger sisters Older brother Younger sisters Youn ger sisters young men exhibited: (1) self - efficacy, (2) future orientation, (3) willing to make sacrifices, (4) internal locust of control, (5) self - awareness, (6) strong need for achievement, (7) academic self - confidence, (8) race pride, and (9) masculinity (Whiting, 2009b). Because of the construction of 66 m able to extend, complicate, and challenge what counts as academically high performing. not provide a space to explore how these young men came to these traits or w hat allow ed these scholar identity traits to sustain or persist. Without exploring these questions, it might put forth a problematic assumption that these traits are only inherent or intrinsic and therefore ca nnot be acquired, learned or taught. As such, this area is currently under - theorized. For example, Will (according to W ill) students are pushed to dislike and disengage from school. College b ound Black young m en . All of the young men were college bound before I met them. As such, I can not take credit for their attendance in the WCL summer program. After participating in the WCL, all four scholars applied to multiple colleges, including Success Ticket University (STU). All four young men were accepted to STU and two actually attended STU in the fall of 2014. All of the scholars were freshmen in college at the time of the completion of this manuscript . The WCL staff members and I spoke to all of the young men at length about college and the application college process. They shared their hopes and dreams about college with me. They (Shawn, Will, and Rajon) also expr essed some concerns about being inadequately prepared to perform well academically in college. They all believed that they had what it t ook to do well in school in general. However, they all wondered to what extent their schools had properly 67 prepared the m for the academic rigor to compete at the collegiate level with students with various academic training in high school. Despite a mix of overlapping contradictions of neutral, positive , and negative experiences in classrooms and schools, they thought life. All of the young men expressed a love for learning new things. The young men never constructed themselves as victims. They enjoyed the intellectual pursuit of intelligence and understood th is as different from doing well in school. According to hooks (1994), excitement and learning could co - exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and or academic engagement. I was fortunate to witness this first - hand with the scholars who parti cipated in WCL - a summer academic enrichment program that did not provide any grades or college credits. The scholars stayed up late and woke up early just to take advantage of the opportunity to read and write about things they had never (according to th eir account) been exposed to before. They spent time in office hours, studied at the library, did research on the Internet, and sent us (program leaders and instructors) email inquiries about the curriculum content. The scholars spoke with acquired langu age and confidence to name or speak explicitly about the ways they were implicated within and because of educational systems. They motivation among the scholars . They would encourage one another in classrooms and discuss one another positively in interviews. For example, Shawn and Will debated in a focus group interview about who had the most college acceptances and the most scholarship funds. Rajon posted on F Table 4.2 68 Table 4. 2 We Choose To Learn (WCL) College Bound Scholar Overview Data Chart Data Collection - gathering techniques are dominant in qualitative inquiry: observation, interviewing, and document Scholar Aaronwick Munn Rajon Thompson Shawn Alexander Will Allen AP & Honors Courses Taken Senior Year AP European History AP Physics AP Math AP English Honors Physics British Lit Honors British Lit Honors Courses Taken Senior Year (Non AP/Honors ) Debate Film Literature Tutorial Anthropology College Readiness Art Meteorolog y Biology Government Math Biology Government Math College Generation Status Non - first generation First generation First generation First generation Highest Education PhD High school Community college High school Fall 2014 College Attendanc e Type PWI PWI HBCU PWI College Scholarshi p Partial scholarship Full ride Full ride Full ride College Major Education (secondary) Education (secondary) Education (secondary) Education (elementary) 69 [and] sense of authenticity...the more sources contributing, the richer the data and the mo re complex the findings" (Glesne, 2011, p. 48). As such, I collect ed several types of data: (a) writing samples throughout the program; (b) videos of each class session; (c) audio recorded individual student interviews; (d) observation field notes; and (e ) reflective memos about informal conversations. Through my layered methodological data collection process I hoped to from the research and through & Lindquist, 2012). Phase I Data Collection Phase I began in a pre - co llege residential university sponsored summer enrichment program, where I was the writing instructor for the student participants. I developed and implemented the writing course curriculum for rising seniors in high school from urban schools, with the fol lowing aims in mind: expose students to college level texts, cultivate college level academic writing, develop scholarly research skills, increase college readiness, and nurture Therefore, I designed and managed a robust learning environment to maximize the opportunities for my students to learn (Lee, 2006). In addition to reading the works below (see Figure 4.1), I also created mini lessons throughout the summer to scaffold students in identifying and developing arguments. For example, I utilized Wendy Belcher's (2009), Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success , C hapter 5 , which explains how to construct strong a rguments. I also adapted mini lessons from Rosa and Eschholz's (2009) Models for Writers: Short Essays and Compositions and Hairston, Ruszkiewicz, and Friend's (2002) The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers to provide guidance in composing. Overall, I a ttempted to create both scaffolded and generative learning spaces. Therefore, we were de - constructing 70 critical theories in education, investigating literary devices (i.e. metaphor), learning about authors (to help the scholars think about where and why pe ople enter into writing) , providing pictures of the authors, asking questions about the title of texts before we read them , etc. All of these scaffolding techniques aided the scholars in accessing and building upon their prior knowledge. In this way , Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). Activating their localized prior knowledge of the readings helped to create invaluable entry points into writing process. We practiced reading like writers throughout the WCL academic enrichment summer program. Next, you will find the syllabus the scholars received on the first day of class : Excerpt of w riting c ourse s yllabus . Classroom Assignments: Reflective Essays Each student is required to submit a 1 - page double - spaced reflective essay based on the course readings to gauge the manner in which students are interpreting course content. Reflective essays should not be mere summaries of course readings, but an analysis, reflection and engagement with course readings. Students may be asked to share from their reflections to generate critical questions for class discussion groups. Use the following guideline when writing your reflections. (Be sure to refer to Reflective Guidelines for specific de tails ): 1. Analyze. Demonstrate that you have understood and carefully engaged the arguments of the readings (this should be the bulk of your paper). 2. Consider how briefly referencing your personal experiences (in K - 12 schools or outside of school) might enliv en your response AND provide a sense of how you are making broader connections between the readings and the larger social and historical context of schooling. 3. 1 - 2 Burning Questions In the course we read the following texts. With each assignment, student s were expected and did write what I The Complexity of Identity (B. D. Tatum, 1997) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970) 71 Metaphors we live by (Lakoff & Johnson, 2011) Dripping with literacy, a jazz - fueled road trip, a place to breathe (Zancanella, 2007) Reading between the lines and beyond the pages: A culturally relevant approach to literacy teaching (Ladson - Billings, 1992) Girls zi nes as a global literacy practice (Guzzetti, 2013) Inventing masculinity: Young Black males, literacy, and tears (Kirkland, 2012) - Assignment (or what I theorize as Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives - A LENs). - m apping: An a cademic a utobiography . Paper Description Draft 1 July 22, 2013; Draft 2 due July 24, 2013 This work is meant to be a tool for personal, political and intellectual reflection about yourself and its impact on your educational and life experiences. It is important and beneficial for you to continuously assess your personal development, confront yo ur weaknesses, and acknowledge your strengths. The purpose of this assignment is to grant you the opportunity to personally, politically, and intellectually reflect on the content of this writing class and your experiences (or lack thereof). In this pape r, I expect that you will utilize course processing in this writing class. However, you should feel free to bring in your experiences from any of your classes this summe r, even at the F reedom School. Within your paper, please consider addressing ar eas of personal resistance, new knowledge/perspectives, change, and/or insights. To inspire your thoughts, please consider questions such as: What do I think of school? What is the purpose of school or education? What has the purpose of school been in my life? What types of activities and engagements do I think happen there? Why do they happen? How have my educational experiences been influenced by my identity? How have my life experiences contributed to my understanding of others and myself? What significant life experiences have I had that have contributed to my perceptions of racial, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. identities in education? How, if at all, can I use education to create new opportunities for myself (and/or the people I care about)? 72 This paper should include a metaphor that compares your academic experiences to something else. Consider how Paulo Freire compared his thoughts about educ a teacher or student), what would you compare it to? This should not be a boring essay, so please tell your stories in full detail and help the reader experience the moment by usi ng sensory images, active verbs, and compelling metaphors. Please include a visual aid to show your metaphor. We will display these visual aids in class on July 24, 2013 when we do our Gallery Walks. You are expected to use 3 - 5 readings from your c lasses. At least 2 readings should be from our writing class this summer. You should cite these authors accordingly, and demonstrate through your writing how you understand their ideas, and the relationship between these ideas and the experiences you are describing. Video r ecorded c lass s essions and d igital o bservations . On the first day of class (before I turned on the video cameras), I explained to the entire class that I am a full - time doctoral student in teacher education and that I am conducting education research. I told the scholars about my interests in helping teachers through my role in teacher education (i.e. by teaching undergraduate courses, working with intern teachers, and sharing my research at education related conferences). Because of my interest in literacy, I explained that I want to document the types of activities that we do in class, their writing, and their comments about the topics we discuss in class. In order to assure that I did not miss anything, I recorded every class s videotapes may be played and replayed, analyzed frame by frame, as a means for close observation aimed at uncovering practices by which people perform some aspect of the ir After my overview to the class, I gave each student an opportunity to choose to sit outside of the view of the camera. I informed every student that they had the right to change their minds and move away from the view of the camera at any point during the four - week 73 program. Every student signed an assent form and agreed to be videotaped during our class sessions. I think it is significant to note that at no point during the four weeks did a student in public or private express that they did not want to be on camera. In fact, there were days when the students helped me to set up the cameras, break them down, or take them to and from my office, which was located in the building where I taught the writing class. For my research, there were at least two video cameras in each of the 11 class sessions. One camera captured the front view of the classroom and the other captured the back view of the classroom. My primary role in the classroom during class was as cours e instructor. As such, each class session was recorded so that I could focus on my primary role as the teacher. Furthermore, I wanted to make sure that all students ha d opportunities for a rigorous academic classroom experience. In this way, my research was teaching. After each class session, I reviewed the videos and took notes about things I f ound interesting that relate d to my t wo research questions. Reviewing the videos helped me in a number of ways. (Glesne, 2011, p. 82). Furthermore, the videos served to re - live events that happened in class with the four Black male students during our interviews. Viewing the videos also helped me to write more informed ed from the four young Black men in my class. If the students ma d e comments in class, but wrote about something that contradicted a comment they made in class, I asked the student about the 74 discrepancy either in the paper, the next day in class or an informal setting, during office hours, or sometimes in our formal inte rviews. Altogether, the videos aided in providing more nuance and completeness to the ethnographic narratives of the young men. Audio recorded interviews . I interviewed all four Black male students in the WCL pre - college summer program individually and at separate times throughout the four - week program. One male was from a suburban context, and the other three males were from large, urban contexts. Each interview was audio - recorded and lasted 30 - 90 minutes per session. Interviews were transcribed afte r the formal interviews and later coded for open, thematic, analytic, and focused coding methods with the goal to describe, interpret, and explain the visual images (Charmaz, 1988, 2013; Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Glesne, 2011). Table 4.3 Summary of Formal Data Received from Scholars Interviews Writing Samples Aaronwick 3 9 Rajon 5 9 Shawn 3 9 Will 3 9 Total 14 36 During my initial observations and interviews, I understood that listening was critical. language, lived conditions, backgrounds, and ways of being in the world " (Kinloch & San Pedro, 75 2014, p. 26). Therefore, I paid close attention to what my students said as well as how they said d education as academically high performi ng Black male students. More specifically, I made field notes about points when their body language changed or I audio recorded myself immediately after our formal interviews to remind myself about gestures or other notable events that occurred during the course of the interview. I also made written and verbal notes about why I thought the student made such gestures during the interviews. 7 At times d uring our interviews in the WCL and on site at their respective high schools , I would reference readings f rom class. Throughout the school year , as I read more research and popular and alternative media about young Black men , sometimes I would ask the scholars about their opinions in our audio recorded interviews. Observation notes . I observed the studen ts in a number of settings throughout the four - week WCL pre - college summer program. Those settings primarily fell into three different types of observations: (1) the scholars as students in their other three academic classes in the summer program; (2) the scholars as instructors at a local elementary school and; (3) the scholars during their academic enrichment workshops and extracurricular activities. In my field notes I included: (a) descriptions and (b) reflections - observer's frame of mind, ideas, and concerns (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998, 2006). When I observed the scholars outside of my writing classroom, I took copious notes either in my notebook, on my cell phone or on my laptop, depending of the context of the situation. For example, if the students wer e writing, I used my notebook or cell phone to take notes. In my notes I wrote about the location of the event; the time . the content , the speakers or leaders , how the students interacted with the leaders and with one another , questions or hunches that I wanted to follow up about in future meetings , and I also drew pictures about what I was 76 observing to capture where things were located. I also audio recorded many of the sessions that I observed. In this way, my observation notes were very interactive an and I was able to make interesting connections between my course and other courses. I noticed how students engaged in different courses. I was able to observe the ways in which the students s ynthesiz ed their understandings of their academic co ntent across the courses. They often referred to something they read about in other courses or they remembered videos they watched in other courses that helped them to understand the context being offered in a given classroom. This was v ery exciting and refreshing to observe and sometimes actively participate in (via making a comment in class). These observations were similar in nature to the observations that I conducted at the Liberty Elementary School and their respective schools. I observed the ways these young men construct ed , negotiate d , and embod ied scholarly identities across academic spaces. Being in their classrooms and schools helped me to understand the support systems that we re in place to help these young men to be(come) and maintain scholar identities. Reflective memos . Every day after one of my interactions with the students, either as a teacher or an observer - participant in other classes, at the elementary school, hanging out a t lunch 2005) about what happened and how I felt about what happened. The opening reflective memo excerpt about Rajon was typical for one of my end of the day refle ctive memos. The date, time, location, scene, atmosphere and initial thoughts and ideas were captured in my reflective memos. While I was not able to write about every single moment of every single day, I intentionally chose to write about important mome nts with one of the four young Black men in the program. I 77 Phase II Data Collection Phase II followed the young men from the summer enrichment program into their re spective urban high schools during the academic school year, which spanned across three different school districts in the Midwest. Because of my access to the young men in and across different academic settings, I was able to contextualize ethnographicall y and compare the ways the young men constructed, negotiated, and embodied literacy identities in different spaces. Audio recorded interviews . For my dissertation study, I engaged in multiple audio - recorded interviews with each student during the academi for me to return to the students and share transcripts from prior interviews or examine previous textual data. The member ref lections were targeted because I asked students specific questions about my initial understandings of the data gathered. In those moments, I was able to get confirmation about the messages they tried to convey in their paper or interviews. Also, this aff orded opportunities for the students to add or challenge some of my understandings (or perhaps add personal understanding). As I continued to build with and learn from my students, these interviews enhanced the accuracy and quality of information gathered with and about individual scholars. During follow up interviews, I shared new journal articles that I came across during the school year, which discussed Black students in education. I also gained some of their insights on the articles and we would have dialogic discussions about the content. The scholars confirmed, complicated, and/or refused some of the content of the articles. 8 Critical narrative analysis . I applied CNA as a theoretical and methodological framework for understanding how the scho lars took up the readings, artifactual literacies education narratives and their subsequent interviews that served as reflections about the former. 78 Each scholar read the same literature from the writing course and they all dialogued about the readings in small groups during the writing class. At the end of WCL, each scholar wrote an artifactual literacies education narrative (A LENs) and had an initial interview about their narratives during the summer program. In analyzing their artifactual literacies e ducation narratives, I triangulated the concepts raised in their essays with their interviews, reflective writing about the assignment, my observations, and the videos from class. Through this method, I was able interrogate their A rtifactual LENs and how t hose narratives were recycled within larger discourses on education, meritocracy, institutional and individual agency. In the context of the summer program, each student had access to laptops. Student tudy. Their texts we re full of meaning and also provide d A LENs into the lives of the scholars. Student texts manifested in multiple formats. For example, within the context of the summer writing course, students responded to writing prompts in the curr iculum. Once students authored those texts, they emailed those texts d feedback for every student in the class (all 20 students). and analyzed using CNA (Souto - Manning, 2014a, 2014b). According to Souto - Manning, CNA combin es two research methodologies, way that they can each productively inform one another. CDA is co ncerned with "institutional discourses, question the definition of power discourses, and suggests the intertexual recycling of institutional discourses in personal narratives and the adoption of personal narratives in institutional discourses" (Souto - Manni ng, 2014, p. 206). Whereas, Narrative Analysis (NA) is concerned with how people appropriate themselves and others in their own narratives. Souto - Manning explains 79 that CNA effectively examines both the institutional and personal discourses of narratives in ways that help us to understand how they shape and are shaped by one another. As such, she notes there are two primary components of CNA are grammatical agency and framing agency. Grammatical agency is agency portrayed linguistically by the use of subject plus action verb. When one portrays oneself as an actor in the sentence (subject) as opposed to a passive recipient of the action (object), grammatical agency is displayed. Framing agency is the narrator's character alignment with normative and s ituated morals (p. 208). In this way, CNA provides both a language and a tool for the type of research and analytical work that I conducted with my research participants. For example, when I think about my relationship with my student Rajon, I am forced to consider both his (1) grammatical agency and (2) framing agency. In the quote, the problems I've avoided to be where I am. I realized how I've never got caught up in any situatio communication on 7/24/13). Through his framing agency (alignment with normative and situated morals) he acknowledge d ed grammatical agency because he wa s taking responsibility for not getting caught up in negative situations that would have stifled his high academic performance in school. Therefore, Rajon expresse d that constructing the writing assignment for our class provided an ave nue for him to author his agency in his personal narrative. make sense of their realities, come to question issues affecting their lives, start problem posing" (S outo - Manning, 2014, p. 205). CNA helps researchers and participants understand and question the ways institutional discourses inform personal narratives. Therefore, it helps people to see 80 and understand their own agency in critically meaningful and transf ormative ways. With my students, the preliminary analyses from utilizing a CNA method was used to inform - Street, 2008; Morrell, 2004) with the students during the su mmer program. Because I saw each student approximately 5 - 7 days a week during the summer program either in class, during office hours or in more formalized settings (i.e. class, audio recorded interviews), I also addressed any lingering questions about ho w and why they authored their narratives in specific ways. (Souto - Manning, 2014b , p. 16 2 . Montero and Washington note, "people live out their lives Washington, 2011). CNA proposes that when individuals make sense of their experiences through narratives, they bring together the micro (personal) and the macro (social or institutional) situations in place (Souto - Manning, 2014b). By carefully analyzing these micro and macro experiences, I was able to show or re - experiences in ways that were helpful to those concerned about the lives of Black young men in education. Discourse shapes society and is shaped by society (G ee, 1990, 1996). Thus, i t is an inherent and inseparable part of the social world, of the broader social context (Souto - Manning, 2014b). And since social realities become realities through discourse, we cannot ignore the role of discourse in trying to un derstand complex relationships involving social interactions, structures, and everyday lives (Souto - Manning, 2014b). Analyzing the triangulated narratives of the scholars allowed me to better understand these complex relationships involving the aforementi oned social interactions, structures, and everyday lives of the scholars. 81 In order to facilitate a humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) and engaged pedagogies (hooks, 1994), I was purposeful in the classroom assignments I constructed for and with my students. First, I wanted to get to know my students, what they valued, and where they were from. I wanted to also get to know them in a creative and memorable way. Therefore, on the first day of class, I had each to student to write eight lines of text to intro duce themselves. I noted that this text could be a song, poem, or rap. However, there were three stipulations. The text must include their name, the city they were from, and their high school. I told each student they would have to work in groups. The scholars were provided with iPads to introduce themselves to the rest of the class. I had to tell students they had the liberty to move outside of the classroom, go in the hallway or outside to develop their videos. At first, it was like they were not u sed to leaving the classroom to do work. Some students even raised their hands for permission, demonstrating indoctrination of traditional ritualized schooling practices. In this chapter, I explicitly addressed the methods used for the dissertation study. The design, methods, and analyses were informed by the initial data gathering and preliminary analyses gathered from the research participants. I aimed to provide a clear sense of how the research questions are connected to the data methods and analyses proposed in this chapter. C hapter 1. Analytic category development . In order to demonstra te the process of developing analytic categories, I revisited the findings from the study. After carefully examining the responses from each scholar and across the scholars, several patterns emerged. Of those patterns, I address two of them in this disse rtation. I refer to these two major patterns as analytic categories and they comprise the two findings chapters (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively). The 82 r acialized and gendered experiences as young Black men. The second analytic category about the young Black men. There are four analytic frameworks that g uide d my analyses of the aforementioned analytic categories - Projects in Humanization - PiHs (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), Critical Narrative Analysis - CNA (Souto - Manning 2014a; Souto - Manning, 2014b), Critical Race Consciousness - CRC (Carter, 2008), and Scholar Identity Model (Whiting, 2009). PiHs are the primary framework through which I understand the latter frameworks. PiHs are grounded in acts of listening and the telling, retelling, and re - presenting of stories in nonlinear way s; as such the stories prese nted are complicated, complex, and multi - voiced (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). While I utilize d all four frameworks in both of the analytic category chapters, I rely more heavily on CNA in C hapter 5. Analytic Category 1: Artifactual Literacies Education . My first finding was that developing A LENs examine d stories of ( de ) humanization, meritocracy , and refusal. These stories were articulated through the (a) content, (b) process, and (c) impact of their projects. Consistent with th e literature , heavy provide an unders tanding of culture, family, and community" (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010 , p . vii ). The richness of meaning that provided insights about everyday life could be seen in all of the artifacts. My Black male s tudents want ed to do well in school in spaces that acknowle dge, value, and respect their humanity. However, they often fel t constrained in expressing their 83 creativity and intelligence in their traditional classrooms . This led me to believe that their s chools ( in their current form ), was kill ing the curiosity of my students, even th ough they were academically high performing students. The critical pedagogical approach discussed in this analytic category was humanizing and enhanced their critical consciousness in ways that honored their Blackness and maleness. Analytic Category 2: Intersectional i dentities . I found that there were both macro level and micro Through examining several micro level stories, I was able to better understand the ways the scholar s actively worked to Adichie, 2009) on a daily bases toward the goal of interrupting macro level discourses about young Black men. As with A LENs, these stories manifested through (de)humanization, (myths of) meritocracy , and ref usal. However, this analytic category emphasized how the scholars were (a) constructing, (b) negotiating , and (c) embodying their intersectional identities on a daily basis. In this study, we see the micro level ways that young Black men are disrupting t hese single stories and enacting agency in nonviolent, thoughtful , and effective ways. The scholars made daily decisions about their intersectional identities. They negotiat ed the tensions between who they are and who they wanted to be. I provide eviden ce about the mental and performative work among and between the scholars toward this end. At the Overall, Black male scholars as demonstrated here, like anyone else , want ed to be seen, heard, and loved. They want to be humanized in schools and related academic spaces. 7 This dissertation took place during particularly difficult moments in American history. These difficult moments demonstrate that in U.S. society it is common place to kill young Black men and dehumanize them, even in their deaths. Because several Black men were murdered during 84 the years of my dissertation project, I wanted to be able to historicize the urgency and necessity for this work. Most of the Black me n who were murdered were unarmed. Most of the Black men and their families received no justice for their untimely deaths. The verdict of the Trayvon Martin murder trial was released while I was teaching the scholars in July 14, 2013 during my third summer of teaching scholars. This was during my data collection summer for my dissertation. 8 During my 4 th summer as an instructor in the WCL there were several untimely and callous deaths of Black men. To name a few, Eric Garner was murdered on July 17, 2014 in Staten Island, NY (in my hometown of NYC). The verdict to not indict his murderer, Daniel Panteleo was released on December 3, 2014 while I was coding and analyzing findings about the scholars. Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, MO August 9, 2014 wh ile I was preparing my research presentation for the International Conference on Urban Education (ICUE), which focused on the Dismantling the cumulative risks for young black men - toward a goal of helping teachers utilize culturally sustaining pedagogical approaches in secondary settings. He should have been in college, just like the scholars discussed in this dissertation. Unfortunately, he was murdered the weekend before he was scheduled to leave for college. Instead of getting a moving vehicle, his pare nts had to get a hearse instead. On November 22, 2014, 12 - year - old Tamir Rice was shot by police officers who barely stopped their vehicle before they shot. Tamir died the following day. The verdict to not indict was released on November 24, 2014 shortly after my return from the ICUE conference. 85 CHAPTER 5: A rtifactual L iteracies Education Narratives - A C atalyst for Unpacking Raced and Gendered Experiences of Academically High Performing Black Male Students were important because they are what represent yo ur effort in the (Aaronwick - A LENs) not be a dropout statistic. I want to be an associ ates, bachelors, (Rajon - A LENs) would hate to contribute to the problem, so I achieve the unex (Shawn - A LENs) to be successful in life [from] those kids that are not going to be ers by (Will A LENs) These excerpts come from their Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives (A LENs), a layered assignment in my summer writing course in WCL. In these Artifactual LENs , the scholars constructed conceptually sophisticated and artfully intimate details about their rtifactual LENs these young men wrote, the artifacts the y chose to visually represent their narratives, as well as their written reflections (via email) and verbal discussions (via classroom talk and follow up interviews) about these artifacts , exp eriences compliment, contradict and get recycled within larger discourses on education, meritocracy, institutionalized racism and individual agency. 86 Their narratives are raced, gendered, and classed. In this analysis, I emphasize the raced and gendered aspects of their experiences. However, it is difficult to ignore socioeconomic class, as it is intricately intertwined, shapes and is shaped by their Black male lived experiences. Through their A rtifactual LENs, the scholars share d how they see and experi ence the world, including their schools as young Black men, rather than as race - less or gender - less beings. Participating in the WCL writing course provided multiple spaces for the scholars to explore and express those experiences, especially through writ ing and dialogue. In this way, writing became a catalyst for unpacking the experiences of the scholars. Because writing was central to the ways the young Black men unpacked their educational narratives in the WCL writing course, writing functioned as a s ignificant method of inquiry to name current realities and propose alternative realities. According to Valerie Kinloch (2010), writing is a space where students can learn to exchange ideas, explain positions, critique perspectives, question values, establish points of (p. 44). The artifactual literacies education narratives provided such a space for the young men to engage in all of these aforementioned aspects of writing. It would no close to any level of accuracy with understanding and representing t heir stories I had to offer their complex and conflicted interweaved narratives ; t hereby disrupting the single story about young Black men. In this work, I attempt ed to honor my students as a worthy witness (Winn & Ubiles, 2011) 9 or as a friend who full y understands (Paris, 2011) to frame for humanizing research (Paris (Lawrence - Lightfoot & Hoffmann Davis, 1997; Tieken, 2013) 87 affords me an entry point to offer a more representative story of these young men lives because Portraiture, (2013) notes that portraiture requires explicit attention to pos itionality influence but, instead, to identify, understand, and balance this influence. These scholars (my research participants) , who I was privileged to know and grow with , are rhetoricians in their own rights. The young me n have valuable stories to tell and this was but one space (of many) where those stories are honored. Throughout the dissertation , I offer description and analysis in other spaces where I learned these valuable stories; here I focus on the A LENs. In this chapter, I theorize about A LENs through an assignment in our writing class over the summer. Each of the young men wrote A LENs during WCL in the summer of 2013. I briefly describe the assignments and classroom activities leading up to the construction of their narratives. I then illuminate the themes within and across the artifact essays. Lastly, I demonstrate more explicitly how the artifactual narratives might inform us. That is, I share some of the meanings the scholars and I ascribe to these arti factual literacies education narratives by speaking to how they were used both within and beyond my summer class. For example, they used the A LENs to (1) author themselves or name particular identities and (2) they were also used as the foundation for th eir college admission essays. In the next section, I provide context Context for Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives (A LENs) In this section, I provide some context for how the assignment (that I analyzed) in the context of this chapter came about. There were several assignments leading up to the A rtifactual 88 LENs. A LENs was a final project in the writing course. Throughout the course , the students read, wrote about , and engaged in dialogue about critical th eory in education. A LENs was a layered project in that students had to construct a metaphor that described their educational narratives. I encouraged the scholars to reflect on how Paulo Friere (1970) constructed his about Lakoff and Johnson ( 2011), who argue that we always use metaphors to better understand reality. The scholars also had to create or buy a physical artifact that somehow represented their educational narrative experiences in school. On the last day of the WCL writing class, all of students engaged in a gallery walk. More specifically, they (1) displayed their hardcopy essays on tables for everyone to read (2) exhibited their physical artifact (described in the narrative) and (3) they also had a blan k sheet of paper where fellow scholars could give positive and constructive feedback. All of the scholars visited experience the narratives of the scholars. In my class, the scholars expressed being introduced to the ideas of critical consciousness raising (Freire, 1970) and critical pedagogy (Willis et al, 2008) . After being exposed to critical theor ies in education and engaging in critical pedagogies within ou r classroom community (and throughout the WCL program), the young men expressed appreciation for being allowed to be themselves. They also jumped at opportunities to challenge, problematize , and deconstruct institutional discourses, especially concerning education. Reading, writing and openly dialoging about these concerns helped to raise their critical consciousness, which ultimately helped them to name and describe their own realities more completely. These experiences also (re)affirmed , and sometimes challenged , their own ideologies about the purposes and goals of education, and for whom. There was a positive and welcoming energy around the idea of being honest and 89 experiences into my work and I want to thank you for that. This whole experience has been truly great experience. It showed me how people can actually take their time out of their day to help inner city or suburban area children. I've never done anything like this. This one project I can say flashed my light back on my education because I was starti ng to doubt the schooling Aaronwick said, the room made eve how some people put pieces of themselves into their writing to take that extra step to be personal and it has shown me how I can improve and do Will shared, before. It was a lot better than having everyone go in front of the class and read their paper out loud. I know things while doing this paper. I know this experience will make me a bet Overall, the energy around the project was positive. Their comments speak to the growth they had , both personally and academically , as writers. Accessing parts of themselves that they had not previously been asked to access created invaluable spaces of vulnerability, critical awareness, and growth. What a missed opportunity! These young men had gone through most of their K - 12 schooling experiences and had never been asked to critically write/reflect of their positionality as human beings and to consider how that affects the ways they engage in and experience education. They all note d how this experience was personally moving, but what added complexity and richness to their understanding of themselves/their experiences was getting a 90 d that creating our classroo m community up front made accepting echoed by each of the young men. Hearing from the scholars about the impact this assignment had on them speaks to the need for teachers to create opportunities for young people to be intentional about creating genuine relationships with students. Toward a Theory of Artifactual Literacies Education Narratives (A LENs) Pahl and Rowsell (2010) introduce a theory about the signif icance of artifacts in mediating our everyday literacies. They argue that artifacts are particularly significant because that bring in new identities" (p. 64) . Artifacts are heavy with meaning and when students select artifacts to represent their experiences, it creates a powerful opportunity to listen and understand what students value. More specifically, they note artifacts "offer insights about everyday li fe, and provide an understanding of culture, family, and community" (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010 , p. 64 ). They note that an artifact (or object , used interchangeably) ha s the following qualities: Has physical features that makes it distinct, such as color or t exture Is created, found, carried, put on display, hidden, evoked in language, or worn Embodies people, stories, thoughts, communities, identities, and experiences Is valued or made by a meaning maker in a particular context 91 In crafting the Artifact ual LENs project for the scholars , I wanted acknowledge who they were as people and to better understand how that shape d and wa s shaped by their experiences in education, especially in spaces where they we also sees literacies as being multimodal and asks educators to think about literacy teaching as , p. 3 ). The word multiple, diverse, and multilingual and spans domains of practice, from home to school to community, and in each domain there are different literacies (Collins & Blot, 2009; Gee, 1990; Guzzetti, 2013; Kinloch, 2010; P ahl & Rowsell, 2010). These literacies are artifactual and link to printed texts... texts to mean books, writing or physical manifestations of ideas (Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). Texts are representations that are inscribed - written or drawn - as opposed to ar tifacts that are found, created, and made for a purpose; texts have a representational quality (Collins & Blot, 2009; Kirkland, 2009; Pahl & Rowsell, 2010). such as writings, drawings, collages, models or f ilms... Texts can be both multimodal and have material qualities, since they contain words and images and these both work together to create meaning (Kress, 1 997; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) " as cited in Pahl & Rowsell (2010). In pairing the artifacts with , I hoped to create opportunities for them to utilize their critical literacies in multimodal ways. As such, one is forced to contemplate, what might this writing show evidence of? Their artifacts and writing about those artifacts then became a lens or a way of seeing into the focal point of their understandings of their critical consciousness about and for themselves, their schools , and their communities. 92 A LENs provided multiple ways for the scholars to conceptualize their sch ooling experiences. Writing about these experiences in critical ways helped them to name, problematize, and re - imagine new ways of being. The artifacts themselves were thick with hidden stories and meanings, which provided interesting insights about the ways the scholars saw their situations and possible selves. Asking the scholars to reflect on the experience in the moment of the A LENs gallery walk provided a window into some of the rawest emotions they had about the project. In the classroom, people were able to feed off of the energy of their fellow scholars. Figure 5.1. Organizing Methodological Framework s I also interviewed the scholars days after the project to inquire about why they chose particular metaphors and artifacts to represent their experiences. In this way, the scholars were able to speak about and provide context for the origins of their artifacts. Overall, this writing and reflection on the writing came in multiple forms. Because of the multiple entry points into the A LENs, I was able to triangulate their educational narratives in meaningful ways. What I believe c ame to the surface we re three themes in their writings: (1) Meritocracy stories and myths, (2) 93 (de)humanizing stories and (3) refusal stories. These stories were articulated through the (a) content, (b) process, and (c) impact of their projects. Table 5.1 Artifactual LENs Themes and Significance ( De)humanizing Stories (Lacking) recognition of full range of humanity (Lacking) acknowledgment of (Lacking) opportunity to develop critical consciousness Refusal Stories Refusing to be a negative statistic Refusing to be agency - less or victim Refusing to be silent (Myth of) Meritocracy Stories (Not) Believing in merit - based ideologies (Not) Engaging in merit - based practices or performances (Not) Acknowledging merit - based agency (structure and/or individual) I now provide examples from each scholar that speaks to these aforementioned themes from their Artifactual LENs using Critical Narrative Analysis (Souto - Manning, 2014a; Souto - Manning, 2014b). Souto - Manning explains that CNA effectively examines both the in stitutional and personal discourses of narratives in ways that help us to understand how they shape and are shaped by one another. As such, she notes there are two primary components of CNA are grammatical agency and framing agency. Grammatical agency is agency portrayed linguistically by the use of subject plus action verb. When one portrays oneself as an actor in the sentence (subject) as opposed to a passive recipient of the action (object), grammatical agency is displayed. Framing agency is the narr ator's character alignment with normative and situated morals (p.208). 94 because they are what represent your effort in the classes, not how much (Aaronwick Munn) Figure 5. 2 . Artifact Picture . project, taken July 24, 2013 by Sakeena Everett. his work with a translucent lighter. Aaronwick open ed his essay by questioning the reader, olely for the purpose of By opening his Artifactual LENs with this question, I believe he positions himself as knowing something or being agentive in understanding the purpose of educ ation. This wa s particularly significant because Aaronwick did not start at this place in his writing or thinking in the beginning of the summer. Aaronwick and I both acknowledged this as a personal area of growth for himself in the summer program. Learning to question, was an important accomplishment for Aaronwick. T he excerpt from our first interview during WCL below illustrates this point. 95 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was another way of teaching besides the banking method. I just thought that like if you give it to people, they they supposed to soak it in. Then um for me that helped me learn that I can ht not not get the answer you want Reading, writing and dialoging about critical theory in my summer writing class helped Aaronwick realize that he can as He expressed that felt he learned about various teaching strategies and how to name them (i.e. dialogue about the text Pedagogy of the Oppressed helped him reposition himself toward a more they the best Here one can see how reading critical theory and unpacking it with classmates affirmed and fueled his agency in taking intellectual risks. An engaged pedagogical approach hen ce created an opportunity for this young man to not only consider alternative perspectives, but to challenge and problematize those perspectives through dialogue, critical writing , and in reflection about the writing process. As you can see from Aaronwi Furthermore, Aaronwick offered two main arguments in his A rtifactual LENs. First, he believed 96 A rtifactual LENs unveils hi s individual experiences and beliefs about education as well as identifies several contradictions and inconsistencies within the institution of education. He then problematized them and challenged them, thereby engaging in action. Throughout this discuss ion wa s a complex weave of his micro level or personal everyday education narrative experiences and macro level institutional discourses on education. These co - existing and often competing purposes of education shed some light on privilege and access to o pportunities for Aaronwick and for the others scholars in general. s ystem of e ducation is f . Aaronwick was troubled by ideas of meritocracy educatio individual could be life they are rewarded for their efforts. Hope manifests itself by convincing students and their noting tha where students are 97 opportunities for success. His narrative bec a me more layered when he intentionally mention ed that for him, never a question on if I was going, it was where mentioning his complex relationship with schools, he entangle d his own agency and the agency students. Because his parents forced him to go to school and mo re specifically decided which school he would attend, he was framing his agency within a set of situated morals ; listening to his parents and going to school out of obligation. Because his parents wanted particular college options available to Aaronwi ck, he explain ed in his narrative that they moved him from a large urban school district to a smaller He unities in which you can use your schooling. went on to explain, there are he knows of people without formal education who are just as successful as those without formal education. Here, he raises 98 both a theoretical and a practical concern for many people today. In this way, he deal t with the issues of access and privilege to certain educational and later career opportunities. He went on d this question, while also participating in the institutional happenings of school. There is an interesting shif t in his language that signals an inconsistency. More specifically, he explain ed success in the future. Do you have to be given opportunities or can you just obtain them if you want to? If opportunities were easily obtainable, then his parents would not have to uproot their family from the urban community where he was born and relocate to the suburban community where he attended high school. Aaronwick hedge d a bit in the aforementioned phrase, but he later commit ted to the idea that there is an unequal distribution of opportunities and advantages, especially between those in urban and suburban schools, according to Aaronwick. He illustrate d this point by saying, trapped inside urban schools. Will they get as many chances to succeed as me? Or even half as many? Their [sic] getting punished because they attend a less fortunate school and Aaronwick believe d there is a clear divide between schools in urban and urban communities. This divide is intricately entangled in race, culture, socioeconomic class. . Aaronwick sp oke to his A LENs as a Black young man in predominantly white schools in what I refer to as a Aaronwick t hought of himsel f as a good student. In fact, he declare d grades [are] important because they are what represent your effort in the classes, now how much , Aaronwick return ed to the idea raised in the opening line of education 99 narrative about the distinction between schooling and learning. According to Aaronwick , grades do n o Aaronwick reported controlling his efforts (grades). That is, he chose not to put i n much effort up until high school. H study. When he wanted to do better, starting in high school , he began studying and aiming for This narrative bec ame complicated when he s poke to some of the reasons he started aiming that black kid who was a troublemaker or acted out for atten tion. I wanted to be higher than many of my white counterparts so I worked twice as hard This reveal ed a complex motivation for succeeding. Aaronwick had a point to prove. White people in his school had negative images of Black kids and he did not want to be a part of those images. to be the Black kid who did not take care of business. Being better than his white counterparts, according to his ac count , did not was the only way that he could get ahead. In this way, he recognized there was a difference Throughout this transition from middle school to high school , 100 dropout statistic. I want to be an associates, bachelors, masters, or (Rajon Thompson) Figure 5.3 . Artifact Picture . taken July 24, 2013 by Sakeena Everett. fishnet and used a plastic orange, white and black clownfish . In Rajon chose to use a picture of Marlin, an overprotective father from the 2003 Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo s picture ( figure 5.2 ), Marlin is on one side of a large fishnet, while the members from his hometown (Great Barrier Reef) are featured on the opposite side of the fishnet. The fishnet symbolized the physical separation that Marlin had to undergo in order to pursue the thing he desired the most. Marlin informed the community members that he needed to leave their hometown in order to search for Nemo (his son), who was abducted. In the movie, Marlin had reason to believe that Nemo had been taken to Sydney, Australia. As Marlin left the 101 community, there was no way for him to anticipate the journey ahead of him. However, his love for his son motivated him to endure the unforeseen risks until he successfully brought Nemo home. R LENs ma de two main arguments: (1) Education is a ticket toward success or a lives plague d by poverty, violence , and imprisonment. Uneven distribution of resources make some st o not motivate him to succeed academically. Rather, his observations and lived experiences from his close friends and relatives are what motivate him to succeed academically. . From his Artifactual LENs, Rajon grew up in environments where poverty and violence were commonplace. More specifically , round me get I refer to this section of his Artifactual LENs as a (my th of) meritocracy story. In his short life thus far, he spoke vividly about why he exercised his individual agency to pursue education. Through his LENs, he observed: a day for 10 dollars an hour to support themselves and the 3 kids they attention in school and not cut class with their unsuccessful friends living just like them. Rajon noticed a pattern am ong his relatives and friends : they had low education attainment, made minimum wages, cycled in and out of the prison system , and they spent time with like - He sought to re - 102 position his reali Therefore, he believed that if he focused on school , he would be rewarded for his efforts with a life. It also meant creating a new space for himself where he no longer was and pursuing a college e ducation. To illustrate the significance of graduating from high school for Rajon, he included a brief vignette: went fro m competing with her for better grades to not seeing her in school at all. Because of the way Rajon grew up , life for himself and his future family. He believed he had some individual agency to make this happen. Rajon believed that if he focused on education he would be successful, which he acquired through selling drugs in the community and/or stealing from people. . Rajon described how his close family members and friends tried to motivate him to succeed through their stories of struggle. When he reflected on his personal struggles with growing up in a single parent low - 103 income household in an urban community and how he intentionally avoided all of the As su ch, I call this a refusal story. Rajon commented in our initial formal interview that he knew that society He also c ited research literature in his paper from Gary Orfield (1996) and Gloria Ladson - Billings (1992) about disparities in funding, high school graduation, and dropout rates to , mean it means less to me. Education is the most valuable thing that I have possession of and In other words, he purposefully chose to be an academically high performing Black male student. In this way, Rajo young Black men. I , Rajon described education as a ticket out of his community. He spoke about education as an opportunity to show others that it is possible to be from Quahog and not be a bad statistic. F or Rajon , e ducation was framed within an institution of poverty and possibility. Yet, it also functioned as a pathway toward success. He positio ned ed in his A LE and relatives respected my decision and me being in control of my life. They appreciate the fact 104 position ed himself as the leader of his li fe by rejecting a lifestyle that involves crime, gangs and poverty, a normalcy in his community. Furthermore, Rajon note d : and all the problems I've avoided to be where I am. I realized how I've never got caught up in any situations I couldn't get myself out Through his framing agency (alignment with normative and situated morals) , he acknowledge d ed grammatica l agency because he was taking responsibility for not getting caught up in negative situations that would have stifled his high academic performance in school. Therefore, Rajon expresse d that constructing the writing assignment for our class provided an avenue for him to author his agency in his personal narrative. initial reaction to the assignment as an entry point for conversations about the ways assignments can and do bring certain pieces of our vulnerability to the table in transformative ways. When acknowledge and better understand the intentionality in his pursuit of high academic performance. Instead of attacking the way he articulated himself, my approach was instead to sitioned himself as (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014) with Rajon about his A LENs, we also facilitated a meaningful assignment, which later turned into his college admiss ions essay for STU and other colleges/universities. This scholar spoke to his experience through taking agency to authoring his own text in meaningful ways. 105 It was undeniable that the schools believed we were nothing but criminals in anything I do (Shawn Alexander) Figure 5. 4 . Artifact Picture . July 24, 2013 by Sakeena Everett. a chilling image of a plastic yellow school bus with a pair of silver handcuffs wrapped around the school bus to repre d irony, sarcasm, imagery , and strategic repetition to expose his personal experiences about how students in urban schools become criminalized. Shawn actively critique d educational syst ems and how he was treated like a criminal in a school building sin c e the sixth grade, which continued through high school. The school bus represent ed ed the 106 surveillance or criminalization of students, interview after he wrote his A rtifactual LENs, incarcerated, but not knowing. I put the handcuffs over the school bus because you know. It wa would say to the stuff that is happening. You know these kids are in Shawn made three powerful arguments in his artifactual literacies education narrative: (1) future, (2) schools in urban communities invest more in surveillance equipment than in school attend schools with heavy surveillance. This type of dehumanizing treatment, gives urban was our raising awareness (as the reader) about a larger concern of institutional racism that tends to disproportionately negatively affects the schooling experiences of Black and Latino youth. o show priorities . I believe that Shawn was disrupting our notion of meritocracy by demonstrating that institutional racism sifts This is a (myth of) meritocracy story. On the on hand, Shawn describe d that his school receives positive press because his school has a track record for graduating large proportions of its students. When I urban like tendencies, 107 d donations of d in like the first real ghettos of Urbantown (pseudonym). Shawn interesting posi tioning of his school as definitely being in urban school neighborhood, but have suburban resources. It reveal ed that perhaps those of us who study education are not being as nuanced as we can and should be when we refer to urban and suburban spaces. Wha t is being left to unpack then is a code or a proxy for race and socioeconomic class concerns. To illustrate the currency that his school ha d He caution ed In his A That is , he desired a curriculum He shared that he felt like he needed to go outside educat o Fr e i Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) . Urban schools invest more in surveillance equipment than in school supplies . Shawn framed the ways many students from urban schools experience the school - to - prison pipeline on a day - to - day basis. This is an example of (de)humanizing story. For Shawn, education parallel ed 108 prisons for urban students. This was undoubtedly a (de)humanizing effort by urban schools for its urban students. To illustrate this point Shawn note d : Students who attend urban schools in urban areas are given discomfort. They come to school and have to be patted down; empty their pockets, walk through metal detectors, put their book bags through scanners, and attend every class with cameras staring them in the face make a kid not want to come to school. Although the schools believe every move, teaching us what they feel is necessary and implementing school lock downs. Sh awn grammatically position ed thus linguistically constructing his identity as an object as opposed to a subject in the sentence - d his illustration by detailing the ways urban students experience criminalization on a daily basis in school, a place that is supposed to be helping them. necessary , and implementing school l agency on the part of schools as an institutional entity to make student who attend urban schools pe attend school, but they do it anyway because they feel obligated to do so. He goes on to describe the progression of surveillance: First they used metal detect ors, then a scanning wand, after that, students - ray. It felt as if the school took no time to buy school supplies. By explaining the progression of surveillance at his school and utilizing sarcasm about the school - , was a critique of his ed this critique by problem 109 A ccording to Shawn, lock downs were a mechanism school were implemented to control the movement of students. These lock downs would last from a few minutes to a fe w hours (sometimes the whole school day) ; t o which he asked the e n tim was used here d h ave t o g ive y ou k nowledge i n o rder f or y ou to l . By constructing this narrative, Shawn wa This was story achieve[s] the un d to be agency - less or voice - less in the (de)humanizing processes of urban schooling that he experience d ook this notion a bit further by shifting his agency later in the essay to note: My experiences with education make me want to become a teacher. That way I could use my education to influence the people around me. I would purposely work in an urban school in an urban community. I want to show students it is possible no matter where r you to 110 want these kids to fail. Just like in prison these guards or leaders is where [people in prison] belong. I know I c an use education to better myself. ed to use his knowledge to bring awareness or consciousness in critical ways to students who attend urban schools. That is, he want ed to let them know that some people want them to fail and they do not have to rely on teachers to acquire knowledge. Further , sports is not the only way that one can this way, Shawn was clear in the fact that acquiring knowledge was not equal to getting an education. weed out children that are going to be successful in life [from] those kids that are not going to be successful in (Will Allen) A LENs skyscraper. However, due to lack of availability of a skyscraper model at the time of the program, he improvised and used a Jenga building block set. H e describe d his metaphor of education as a skyscraper because of the foundational support needed in the construction process, that are offered in schools sho uld provide opportunities for students in schools. 111 Figure 5. 5. Artifact Picture . July 24, 2013 by Sakeena Everett. Will provide d at least three main arguments in his A LENs. First, Will argue d schools ed k nowing that the educational system is set up to weed out students can also position individuals to make the to end up in the successful track, as oppose d to the unsuccessful track. Lastly, Will claim ed that going to urban schools ha d its disadvantages of (a) unequal resources, (b) racially segregated communities, and (c) high teacher attrition. . According to Will, people go to school in order to lay the groundwork for their future success ; These foundations, according to Will, build toward their success in life. Furthermore, he argue d that education is about expanding o d this argument by noting that while people have , primary ca tegories: (1) those who will succeed and (2) and those who will not succeed. This 112 This is a (myth of) meritocracy story. Will provides a concrete example of ways he is beginning to enact problem posing (Freire, 1970) was assigned to work with third through fifth graders. While he was there , t o u rban s chools h as d . Going to urban schools has its disadvantages of (a) unequal resources, (b) racially segre gated communities, and (c) high teacher attrition , according to Will . This is an example of a (de)humanizing story. Within the unequal resources , that were currently fund These disadvantages persist because African Americans and Latinos are deni ed access to fair and equitable educational access opportunities. single - sex high o was interesting because he positions structural inequalities (e.g. funding and segregated neighborhoods) as the core of the issue. Yet, he was also framing Black males in particular (his Black male sin gle - contributing to their own demise in education. Here , it seem ed as if the institutional discourse about failing urban schools was influencing how he perceive d his peers. 113 disadvantages because an urban the way school funding is decided through because we all should have equal education. Most of the urban areas are mostly African Americans and Latinos. I believe this system is holding African Americans and Latinos back from being equally educated [with] Whites. Will expose d institutional racism as he expe rience d it in his hometown city. He said the neighborhoods and schools in Urbantown we ed a role in how students we re being taught in classrooms. I go to an all African American school. The resources we have might not Will frame d institutional racism as shaping his schooling experiences. He disclose d that he is aware of the ways neighborhoods and schools are systematically segregated and resourced. One suggestion that Will offer ed as a way that schools work to include some students and exclude (1970) in place , he indicated. Will argue d in his A LENs that creating learning spaces in school discourage students from learning and it makes students not what to go to school. However, with a problem posing approach , , to me , is about expand Will , do not prioritize the expansion of student knowledge. 114 In this way, Will frame d situated institutional goals and demands and show ed how those ecisions. Will grammatically position ed himself as having Knowing that the educational system is set up to weed students out can also position individuals Individuals can create opportunities for themselves by using education to help others. For e xample mother switched his school (exercising her agency ) and thereby chang ed his academic trajectory and immediate outcomes in school. . Will conclude d by noting that he believe d we can , explore equitable and fair. He offer ed that we can change school funding practices, thereby changing the nature of urban communities i.e. providing more oppo rtunities for adults in the community to obtain jobs in their own communities. He suggested that we must stick together in this fight As such, Will is refusing to accept poverty and fa Discussion one of our interviews. More specifically, he wished that people took more time to ask the aforementioned question rather than In order to begin to understand what he is about, we have to listen (Kinloch & San Pedro (2014) and see him for who is and who wants to be. This work is 115 grounded in acts of listening and the telling, retelling, and re - presenting of stories in nonlinear wa ys ; as such the stories presented are complicated, complex, and multi - voiced (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). Part of seeing the scholars was acknowledging and respecting their identities. This was a humanizing space where they could actively engage their sc holar identity traits (Whiting, 2009) and critical race consciousness (Carter, 2008). Writing through their scholar identities created space for them to explore themselves as academicians and critically examine why they had particular beliefs about educat ion. Writing through this project also affirmed (both individually and collectively) that they could achieve within the context of being Black (Carter, 2008). The scholars offered diverse, provocative and multi - voiced perspectives in the A LENs project. This was a culminating project. In order to get the scholars to be willing to share their dialo g u e (Watson, Sealey - Ruiz, & Jackson, 2014) . As Shawn noted in one was that scholars had in mentoring one another (Watson, Sealey - Ruiz & Jackson , 2014) . As is evidenced by the a rtifacts themselves, the scholars had some reservations about schools and teachers. By asking the scholars to be vulnerable, I had to be vulnerable as well. This meant taking risks and being ready to address whatever wounds may h ave been opened through these activities. cultivated a positive critical race consciousness for the scholars (Carter, 2008). The A rtifactual LENs ha d three components: the content, process, and handcuffs artifact help s educators and researchers to understand what he felt when he wrote 116 Ra Finding Nemo artifact pushe d us to consider the implications of what it meant for him to leave Quahog in order to pursue a quality education. These examples speak to the content of A LENs. Furthermore, this finding was consistent with the compositi on literature which indicates that writing is a critique perspectives, question values, establish points of view, and reflect on beliefs that may (Kinloch, 2010 , p. 44 ). The process of the A LENs project had several levels. Not only did the scholars write about their educational experiences, students also created and/or purchased artifacts that best represented their LENs. Once the papers were written, artifacts were selected, and the scholars engaged in a gallery walk at the end of the WCL program ; the scholars started to experience the impact of their work on others and on themselves . The impact was both interpersonal and intrapersonal. En a rtifacts encouraged internal and external reflections because people asked one another questions and gave critical feedback. They helped one another to see things and experience feelings that had not previously surfaced. The preface of this dissertation s poke . tears). He also wrote scholars realized areas of improvement. For example, Aaronwick note d in his reflection about 117 entity to (Tatum & Gue, 2010, p. 139 ) . It sp oke explicitly to the ways the scholars encouraged and perhaps mentored one another. Watson, Sealey - Ruiz, and Jackson (2014) talk about the significance of culturally relevant care (CRC), which is characterized by a strong sense of community, rigorous demands, an integration of humanity. When I listened to the scholars I heard several themes across their Artifactual LENs. Those cross case themes consisted of: (1) rhetoric of possibility through meritocracy where the scholars discussed the implications of institutional racism, (2) inequities between and among suburban and urban schools and communities, (3) oppressive violence and policing, (4) discrepancies between learning and education, (5) agency to give back to their communities and (6) proving people wrong. In the followi ng sections, I speak more explicitly about how these themes emerged across the scholars. Rhetoric of p ossibility through m eritocracy ( i mplications of i nstitutional r acism) . The scholars all had rhetoric of possibility in their essays. They all brought into this idea of meritocracy , to a certain extent, even though they all understood that people are afforded access to different opportunities in life. As such, they often grappled with this in their writing and subsequent reflections about their A LENs. All of the young men spoke about institutional racism, though none of the scholars named this phenomenon as such. Rather, the scholars spoke functioned in different aspects of their lives. The young men problematized and critiqued systems of education for perpetuating inequity even though they all were some extent) from this very system of inequity. They actively brought into the discourse of 118 education as an opportunity to succeed. After identifying institutional discourses, they problematized and challenged them, ultimately engaging in action (Souto - Manning, 2014). The young men never grammatically positioned themselves as victims. Rathe r, they often positioned make better lives for themselves and their families/communities. Further, they framed their agency as being complicated within situated institutional constraints. That is, the young men and not others. Comparing and contrasting urban and suburban schools and communities . The scholars explained the differences between opportunities afforded to people, teaching (expectations) , and differences between urban and suburban schools and communities. As the young men wrote, they each placed themselves in an urban or suburban context. These co ntexts were explicitly raced and gendered for the scholars. For example, Aaronwick spoke about his raced experiences with being the only Black student in his advanced and honors courses in his suburban high school. Because he understood what this meant i n his particular school context, as THE Black kid who did not take care of his academic business. Black students in his predominantly White high school were few in numbers. Plus, most people in his school had , were often Therefore, he felt like a working to constantly combat negative stereotypes about Black students. He displayed his framing agency within a set of moral obligations to succeed because he was a race representative. He grammatically positioned himself as having individual active 119 age ncy to make these changes to do well in school, despite the negative stereotypes about Black students in his school. For Rajon, he raced and gendered his experiences by comparing himself to other young Black men in his neighborhood and school communi ties. He did not want to be like the young men that he knew. He framed the contexts of his neighborhood and community within situated poverty and low educational attainment. Rajon explained in his A rtifactual grammatically positioned himself as being able to succeed, even without role models. He wrote app ealing to him. There is certainly room for growth in helping the scholars to be critical of the same institutions they are all currently successful in and to trouble to notion of success they were constructing for themselves in order to pull back the la (Freire, 1970; Tyson, 2003; Willis, 2008) that inform their daily decisions. There are benefits and consequences for acquiescing to particular notions of success. For example, Rajon described a success, which involved leaving his hom etown. I was also at times, complicit in certain notions of academic success. For example, I could have asked them to consider critically what success would have looked like if they changed their communities, rather than leave them. Shawn raced his e xperiences by saying that he wanted to be in a school setting that was preparing him to be able to compete with other races in the world. He was conflicted about this other races who attend different types of schools in suburban school districts. His grammatical agency positioned as questioning and problematizing his educational access to competitive 120 opportunities, especially compared to other students from different r acial groups. His quest for knowledge was something bigger than his school offered. He framed his agency as being limited within the situated context of his urban school. As such, he went above and beyond to learn additional material beyond the content that his school offered. , - positioned himself grammatically as having agency to expand his knowledge outside of school. He did not want to wait on his teachers to provide him with a competitive education. Will raced and gendered his educational narrative experiences. More specifically, he classma them and choose to do differently. He grammatically positioned himse Overall, all of the young men spoke about the negative connotations of being in urban schools and communities. Likewise, they spoke of the positi ve aspects of suburban communities. Aaronwick complicate d this narrative by bringing in some of his motivations to succeed academically as a race representative. For the young men, these worlds (urban and suburban) were positioned as polar opposites. O ppressive (symbolic) violence and policing in schools and communities . Although t hree of the four young men attended urban schools and lived in urban communities , a ll of the scholars spoke about explicit violence in their schools and communities. This vi olence was visual. Aaronwick attended a suburban school and lived in a suburban community, but he spoke of violence as well. For the three young men in urban schools, the violence was symbolic and 121 physical. It involved walking through scanners in order to clear entry into their schools. In fact, Shawn compared going to school to walking into a correction center daily. In the urban schools discussed here, the scholars were randomly stopped and frisked when walking down the halls. This may or may not ha ve involved police dogs looking for drugs. Sometimes they were stopped They reported that their classrooms doors were loc ked anywhere from minutes to hours at a time, depending on the codes used that day. These codes used more often toward the end of the school year, after much of the standardized test s were completed for the academic year. They were framed as objects in th ese school occurrences, lacking power and motivation to do academic schoolwork after extended periods of being stop and frisks of students. He claimed the building was originally designed to be a prison, but the neighbors protested and the building was made into a school instead. Paradoxically, these experiences combined with their summer teaching experiences a t the elementary school , pushed those young men to consider careers in education. The young men would not have seriously considered education as a career field without WCL summer enrichment program. When I asked the scholars about being teachers, they we re not excited their teaching experiences in the summer program and re flecting on their experiences in school as students, they felt pulled to pursue education careers, framing careers in education as the right thing to do in order to give back to their communities. 122 Learning is not equal to education . The scholars distinguished between the intellectual They all noted that they thought of themselves as They all understood that , for them , grades represented something other than intellectual ability. More Because of their suspicions of schools and teachers to provide them with adequate information to be competitive with people beyond their home and school communities, they all engaged in activities beyond their schools to make themselves competitive. Being in WCL, academic enrichment was one way for them to exercise their exposure to other communities, thus grammati cal ly positioning the scholars as agents. High school then became a vehicle they operated to get from one place to another , get grades and associated accolades. In fact, most of these young men (except for Shawn) reported not doing much actual studying outside of class. that they did not need to study in order to do well in class and schoo l. Framing agency: on giving back . T he scholars demonstrated framing agency or expressed situated morals i , and Will wanted to personally give back to their communities when they become successful via servi ce endeavors. More specifically, Rajon, Shawn , and Will discussed creating local community centers for Black youth in their respective communities. These community centers and programs were motivated by the idea of providing access to better schools and opportunity for success for children from urban contexts. 123 Proving people wrong and being change agents . All o f the scholars were clear that they understood the implications of being Black students, especially Black young men in school. They were consciously aware that their performance academically and behavior - wise was a constant battle against negative statist ics about Black people in general, but especially Black males. People expect Black males to fail, so they choose to do well prove people wrong in their assumptions about Black males . They all explicitly saw themselves as agentive in their learn ing and ma king life decisions. T 006). Overall, I conclude d that the current structures of school s (at least the schools the scholars attended) do not allow students from the curriculum and produce the sentiments that Shawn shared in his LENs reflection : It showed me how people can actually take their time out of their day to help inner city or suburban area children. I've never done anything like this. This one project I can say flashed my l ight back on my education because I was starting to doubt the schooling system, and was losing interest in school . Figure 5.6. Shattered Lens. Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/explore/eye - contacts/ I want to end this chapter with a sha ttered lens. 124 9 According to Winn & Ubiles (2010) there are four phases of worthy witnessing: (1) admission, (2) declaration, revelation, and confidentiality. These phases must be carr - responsib 125 ntold S tories - C onstructing , N egotiating A nd E mbodying S cholar I dentities A cross A cademic C ontexts [3.68 grade point average] (Sha high school and I g to get back in and he hand me this paper like you got to fill out the paper to get back in the your poor judgment in class has gotten you kicked out. Now sit and write a 10 sentence Interview) We Chose to Learn . Untold is an interesti ng adjective for Shawn to have utilize d to describe his experiences as a young Black man because it refers to an experience that is immeasurable ; too much to explain. It also refers to a silenced, null , procl amation wa s personal, complex , characterization of living as a young Black man in society, I found that untold narratives were applicable to all of the scholars : Hence, the name for this chapter. Each scholar , in t heir own way , expressed an untold and intimate understanding of the implications of being young, Black and male. When Shawn shared with me that living as an academically high performing (3.68 GPA , e was speaking about the v , , and an 126 assume the worst of him (e.g. a person who would steal). The assumption was never about his high academic GPA or his college - bound reality. Instead, people underestimate d his worth and unless they t ook time ed to demonstrate how these untold stories exist , not only for Shawn, an individual : Rather, it was a concern for all of the scholars. This is consistent with education, social science and humanities - oriented research literature , treated differently because of their intersectional ident ity markers as Black men. The goal of this chapter , which focuses on analytic category two (intersectional identities) , is to disrupt these scholars. There a re three analytic frameworks that guide d my analysis in this chapter : Projects in Humanization - PiHs (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014), Critical Race Consciousness - CRC (Carter, 2008), and Scholar Identity Model (Whiting, 2009). PiHs are the primary framework thr ough which I understood CRC and SIM. PiHs are grounded in acts of listening and the telling, retelling, and re - presenting of stories in nonlinear ways ; as such the stories presented are complicated, complex, and multi - voiced (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). In order to nuance the ways that I listen to the stories of the scholars , I call ed on critical race consciousness and scholar identity frameworks because of their ability to collectively address some of the significance of race and gender in the lives of t he young Black men. According to Carter (2008), critical race consciousness or CRC are attitudes or beliefs that highlight the awareness of asymmetrical power relationships between Black and White Americans. These attitudes and beliefs frame the 127 ways stu dents understand schooling and upward mobility (Carter, 2008). Furthermore, Carter explains CRC ha ve two main components : (1) Black students have race pride and feel a sense of connectedness to being Black, despite a history of extreme adversity and (2) B lack students see themselves as being able to achieve academically within the context of being Black. As such, they did not see achievement as an ideal separate from being Black (Carter, 2008). Overall, having a CRC helps Black students to achieve. Whil e CRC attends to the centrality of race, it does not adequately attend to the intersectional (racialized and gendered) experiences of Black males specifically. As such, I turn ed to Whiting (2009), who offers the Scholar Identity Model (SIM). A combinatio intelligent are the two main components of SIM. There are nine traits that contribute to a Scholar Identity : (1) self efficacy (2) future orientation (3) willing to make sacrifices (4) internal locus of control (5) self awareness (6) strong need for achievement (7) academic self confidence (8) race pride , and (9) masculinity. While SIM offers important traits of Black male students, it does not speak to how these traits are cultivat ed. I build from these frameworks to nuance racialized and gendered identities of the scholars from WCL. It is my understanding that their intersectional identities have three distinct, but interconnected sub - components. More specifically, I observe d and analyze d how the scholars were (1) constructing (2) embodying , and (3) negotiating their scholar identities across academic spaces. Therefore, this chapter analyzes the intersections of race, gender, and academic performance through these aforemention am specifically talking about the ways the young men define d and ma d e sense of their own tasks. These wer e observable and materialized academic behaviors the young men engaged in. 128 paid particular attention to the ways the young men deal t with and rationalize d tensions presented (in academic settings) as young Black men. The ident ities of the young men are intersectional (Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) because they account for the complex intersections of raced, gendered, and classed. I examine d the interplay of these marked identities by emphasizing my experiences wit h the young men in their respective high schools in our follow up interviews. In this way, I offer some understandings about the insights and processes that shape d In the previous chapter, I address ed how three types of narratives emerged from the A LENs of the scholars : (de)humanizing stories, refusal stories , and (myth of) meritocracy stories. T h e se themes we academic year in the . In this chapter, however, instead of focusing on those themes , I move to the intersectional identity theme that emerged the foreground. This chapter is organized into several parts. First, I historicize Black male id entities. Then, I unpack the three components of identity (constructing, embodying , and negotiating). The manifestations of these components are addressed through the voices of the k to larger concerns with Projects in Humanization, critical race consciousness, and scholar identities. Constructing Identity: On Being Cool, Chilling and Learning Identity construction is the first component of identity that I analyze in this chapter. By d and ma d e sense of their own identities. I utilize the gerund form of constructing to signal that these identities are fluid and situational. Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) te ll us that we have the responsibility as - closely and carefully - to what young people are saying, and how and f or 129 what reasons p. 26 emphasis added). When I listened to the scholars, they all defined and made sen se of themselves in particular ways. They wanted to be seen and acknowledged for the ways they defined themselves, especially since all of the scholars were constructing identities for themselves in opposition to what others defined about young Black men. In this section , I show how each of the scholars are constructing their identities. Table 6.1 Constructing Identity: On Being Cool, C hilling and Learning Scholar Theme Chart Aaronwick Rajon Will Shawn t to associate myself with that . Sakeena: When you think about the different layers of your identity, what part of your identity do you think is most important to you? Aaronwick: Umm [extended pause]. race mattered, but now I think it is the most important. Sakeena: And why? In what ways? Aaronwick: Because I just thought that. Like I mean I knew that obviously African Americans have like previou s history, besides slavery. But I just thought that as soon as I thought of Black people, I thought invented. before. Sakeena: Um hm. So do they talk about those sorts of things in your school? 130 Aaronwick: Uh um left to right] Well it. I mean they obviously talk about slavery, but not about you know before that. A t the time of this interview , Aaronwick was a 16 - year - old Black male senior in a predominately Wh ite , middle - class neighborhood and school. To be specific, Northwood High School (pseudonym) was 70 % White, 20 % Black and 10 % Asian. Northwood H.S. has a prestigious reputation and is located in the Northwood community. Aaronwick lived at home with his mother, stepfather , and younger brother. His mother was a full time special education teacher and also a Ph . D . student in education. His stepfather was an entrepreneur. Aaronwick had a 3.0 overall GPA on a 4.0 scale and 22 on the American College Test o r ACT exam. He also took three Advanced Placement (AP) courses in European h istory, p hysics, and m ath. He received a partial merit - based (as opposed to financial need) scholarship to STU where he is studying Secondary Education. Aaronwick spent much t ime in our interviews constructing his identity as a young Black man from the White middle - class suburbs. In his school , it was taboo to address issues of race. s certainly not an issue or problem. This is consistent with the literature in that predominantly White spaces, White people tend not to acknowledge race (Tatum, 1997) and/or the presence of listened to Aaronwick describe his school , I heard him describe a school organized around institutionally racist practices. By institutional racism , I refer to the structural patterns, discriminatory treatment , or unfair practices of his school in ways that advantage White stu dents and disadvantage Black students. That is, the patterns that organized his school could not be necessarily assigned to one individual. Rather, certain patterns were share overt 131 experiences with racist acts in his school, he explained there was a well - known about Black students at his high school. He shared that African Americans in his school have a was important for Aaronwick to disassociate because he feels like teachers look at him and a might have trouble with him or I might have to put him in the front. Or I might have to isolate noticed a pattern y This practice is a microaggression or a subtle encounter with racism, usually unnoticed by members of the ma jority race (Carter Andrews , 2012; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) within a system of institutional racism. In other words, his teachers did not tell him they were moving his seat (within the classroom) because of his race, but he noticed that Black people ne ver sat together in his classes. It is possible that his White (mostly middle class female) teachers were not conscious of their own practices and did not intend to harm their Black students. Nevertheless, Aaronwick believed this practice was connected t his experiences prior to being in WCL. t his (Tatum, 1997). hyperconscious of his Blackness or what some scholars 132 Andrews , 2012). Reading about critical theory in education and dialoging about concepts like racial discrimination or institutional racism (to name a couple) , helped Aaronwick to make connections about his prior three years of high school as a young Black man in a predominantly Cool , Aaronwick meant that he liked to hear multiple perspectives on any given issue. Because he was positioned as a young Black man in a predominantly White school, he discussed that he had opportunities to listen to Caucasian perspectives as well as Black p erspectives about schools and communities. Most of to offer the perspectives of his Caucasian friends to his Black family members and vice versa. In this way, he s erved as a liaison between these different communities. Serving as a liaison was cool for Aaronwick. I got a unique Another key feature of the identity that Aaronwick was constructing for himself was b eing a learner. Aaronwick believed that real men were smart and worked hard; they were not 133 (1997) T he Complexity of Identity if the subordinates stopped paying attention to the dominant group and just focused on themselves? Would , and in his interviews he was always opposed to rappers) like Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West help ed him to better understand himself as a young Black man. He w as intentional to describe Kendrick and Kanye as lyricists With this type of rhyming , he was and school and family communities. Raising his critical consciousness (Carter, 2008; Freire, 1970; Willis et.al, 2008) , name ly his experiences by participating in WCL , helped him to see how much of his life, especially his schooling and home community experiences , were impacted by his racial identity. For example, Aaronwick worked part - Placement (AP) classes. In his school , they did not offer classes about Africa n American people , you know , not name his schooling experiences. Further, he not really want to associate himself that. His Blackness signaled a past of enslavement and present of 134 - no ne of which he felt truly matched the identity he was w as a form of resistance and mot ivation to succeed academically. work. He prided himself on comple from a low - income, single parent household where he lived with his younger sisters. His mother was unemployed. If he lacked resources, for example not having a computer at home, it was importan t for him to not complain. Instead, he would find someone with cell phone and complete his work using a cell phone. Rajon sent me several pieces of writing during the academic school year (after participating in WCL) using this mode of communication. He loved the class or in front of large crowds of people. However, when he was asked to speak in front of large crowds of people, he reported that it was impo Our third formal interview was on site at Quahog High School. Rajon was 18 at the time. I shared an academic article with Rajon : le, The Scholar identity institute: Guiding Darnel and Black males . I gave him some time to read the article and tell me se. You know , I think about the future all of the time and you By these statements, Rajon was identifying as a scholar. A scholar was one who demonstrated academic achievement and believed they were intelligent. 135 self - Sakeena: How does reading a book or getting good grades translate to you being the man of the house? Rajon: stay focused and make it through college. If you get , men were supposed to be smart, t ake care of their responsibilities, and be providers. He understood that getting a degree was not an automatic increasing their salary in the long run and be , one positioned themselves to be better than their parents and take care of their responsibilities. Sakeena: How d o you feel about being Black? Rajon: good, so I gotta prove them wrong by living above the standards. Sakeena: How do you know about the statistics about Black males? Rajon: Fr gender were central to the identity that he was constructing for himself. He was critically conscious of what it meant to be a you ng Black man. From the outside , being giving up and becoming a negative statistic, Rajon felt obliged to prove people wrong through istent with his A LENs where he refused to be a product of his environment. In this way, he was a constructing a positive racial and gender identity that involved high academic achievement. 136 . Sakeena: Will: [Urbantown] all my life. I wanna have a nice house. Family. I want my kids to go to a better school that I went to and hav e more opportunities that I had. At the time of this interview , Will was a 17 year - old Black male senior in a single - sex high school, which was 98% Black. Eighty - five percent of the students who attended his high school were eligible for free and redu ced priced lunch. M ost of the students who attended Urbantown were accepted to colleges and universities, and many received both academic and mission. igh school was located in a historically significant and culturally rich, but low - income neighborhood in Urbantown. WCL was fresh in his memory and my presence with him in this interview was a reminder of WCL and his experiences at STU. During this time, he was also thinking about the future he was constructing for himself. He had a 3.9 GPA (on a 4.0 scale). He was preparing for the ACT and applying for colleges and scholarships. The Homecoming Dance was soon approaching. The school personnel (during my school visit) at his rivate (Catholic) school for freshmen and sophomore years in high school. He also reported that his mom had him to transfer to Urbantown H . S . because she understood the social capital and opportunities offered through Urbantown. He spent his junior and s enior year at Urbantown. He described Urbantown H. S . 137 image of young Black men going to school , , is interesting because it provides a window into the hope of doing something school, he explained that , being in school was still better than being on the streets and doing nothing. As the excerpt from our interview conveys, Will wanted to do something with his li fe. He was constructing a classic American d ream ; one that involved children and a house in a safe see himself constructing this lifestyle in Urbantown. He d id not want to live in Urbantown for his whole life and he felt that he needed to leave Urbantown in order to pursue his dreams. to describe himself as proud , marked identity for Will and shaped his scholar identity. In addition to high academic themselves as academicians, as studious, as competent and capable, and as intelligent . In our interview, Will define d eptance to wanna 138 ericans are not perceived as W hen I asked him how this made him feel i Americans are talented, but we just - identified as a , according to Will , were on their not ; a serious one . T his scholar identity shaped his interactions across academic settings. It is no wonder that he received the most recorded scholarship dollars at Urbantown High School. He was accepted to 18 colleges/universities. He attended a predominantly White institution outside of his home state where he pursued Elementary Education as his major. hey have in front of their eyes . Sakeena: What do you think society thinks about young Black men in [Urbantown]? Shawn: a 3 point [3.68 grade point average] Shawn was 17 years old at the time of this interview an d attended Urbantown High School ( the same school as Will). w a s a hair stylist and his stepfather was a notion of cumulative risks, he asserts : Black males face more barriers to achievement than other racial and gender groups - they are profiled, negatively stereotyped, and feared because of the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of Black males historically and in the media. Those Black males who have managed to achieve academic success have, 139 more than likely, had to overcome a number of obstacles (Henfield, 2012, p. 217). It is of utmost importan ce to note that Black males (like any other raced or gender group) want to be successful. Therefore, Henfield (2012) argues Black males need empathy, compassion, and support to resist the negative portrayals and stay focused on meeting their goals. It is evident ways he as a young Black man was being perceived by society. This hurt and frustration was also evident in his A LENs when he explain ed chools are a reflection of is no wonder that he fe lt criminalized every time he enter ed into Urbantown high school and walk ed through scanners and metal detec tors. Neal (2013) in Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black masculinities bodies in need of policing and containment. Therefore, the identity that Shawn was constructing for h not fit the scheme that society of young Black men like Shawn from Urbantown. Notice here that Shawn own ed having a 3.68 GPA . Therefore, he demonstrate d a scholar identity (high academic performance and s aw himself as an academician or intelligent). At the same time, he also mitigate d agency in this excerpt of his narrative. He sa id knowing that people think of Black males as primarily criminals and thieves, as opposed to scholars , id that he can not describe to every single person that he meets on th e streets that he is an academically high performing Black male student with a 3.68 GPA , he realize d that he is never assumed to be smart. No one ever mis took him for being a scholar at 140 first glance. Consider the burden in knowing that you are well read, academically high performing, but people fail to notice these traits. In this way, he expressed a type of learned any thing about it) and he just learns how to cope with the of this reality. He mit igate d his agency again by noting that there was nothing that he c ould do to change the minds of unsuspecting strangers. Ultimately, he sa id that most people lt invisible as an academically high performing Black male, at least outside of a traditional school setting where he excel led . As such, young Black men are often boxed into severely limited scripts that define what it means to be Black, male, and scholarly. More spe cifically, many doubt the (academic) abilities of academically high performing Black males and they are often perceived ed why it is crucial to disr upt single stories and complicate the limited scripts we have about young Black men. To illustrate this point, I went on to ask Shawn: Sakeena: So how does that make you feel considering like who you are and that Sh awn: feel uncomfo Though Shawn felt his school and society perceived and treated him as a criminal, he did not allow those things to deter him from achieving academically in school. Instead, Shawn proclaimed lt obligated to not only attend, but also graduate college . ). According to Carter (2008), students who are critically race conscious utilize "racial adversity [that] motivates them to counter societal stereotypes about members of their racial groups and p ersevere in their academic pursuits" (p. 22). Shawn was 141 choosing to achieve in the midst of adversity and negative stereotypes about young Black men like him. LENs project when he not ed that he was starting to lose interest in school before participating in the WCL su mmer enrichment program. In his A LENs , he complained the curriculum was not rigorous so that all of the students could succeed. Therefore, he made efforts to expand his reading and writing skills and experiences outside of the classroom. This fed his l ove for reading and writing (which I will discuss in more detail in the embodying identity section), but undoubtedly also contributed to him receiving a 32 of a scale of 36 on the ACT exams. Learning was not something that he left to schools to teach beca use he felt they thought of him as unable to succeed. There was a lack of trust in schools that guided his achievement. Through his achievements people are going to better understand Embodying Identity: Acti vating my Agency In the previous section of this chapter , I demonstrated how the young men constructed their identities. In this section, I explore how the young men are embodying the identities they addressing the actual performance or implementation of certain tasks. These were observable and materialized academic behaviors the young men engaged in. Taking a closer look at the ways the young men embodied their scholar identities is important because the scholars were intentional about the identities they were constructing for themselves. This was also evidenced in the ways the young men engaged , I unpack the ways the young men enacted the identities they were constructing for themselves. Therefore, this section involves a combination of issues raised by the scholars and my observations of the young men. 142 Table 6.2 Embodying Identity: Activating My Agency Scholar Theme Chart Aaronwick Rajon Will Shawn w hy I p lay l It was be from large urban areas. d going to a rse - class athlete with good grades signified to colleges/universities that he had access to not only different, but more superior , opportunities. , , lik e , urban schools. I say that because I have shared his thoughts about attending a predominantly White suburban high school. According to Aaronwick, what made sch sc 143 After sharing this conversation , ummm , I often schools are uncritically c of urban and suburban schools and we should not take for granted what these terms mean. Urban and suburban have been used as codes or proxies for avoiding complex issues of race, socioeconom ic status, and access to opportunities. The uncritical positioning of these categories and bad. Aaronwick add ed some depth to this conversation by naming explicitly why his mother activated her agency to put Aaronwick in a suburban school. By exploring these reasons , I show how simply using suburban or urban as phrases are both inaccurate and inadequate for describing types of schools and communities. resources and opportunities. Because she wanted a better life for him, sh e made sure to send him to suburban schools where he could garner access to advanced placement courses, college readiness programs , at my school and use them to my advantage. school district in the Midwest. As such, it represents her experience ; a valid experience, but one which is not n ecessarily representative of all urban school districts. For example, I am from N ew York City (NYC), which contains a wide variety of types of urban schools. Some of the schools are very exclusive for the children of celebrities, public figures, and the 144 socioeconomically elite where a myriad of opportunities are embedded within the social and curricular fabric of the school. As such, there are people who travel from local suburban communities to attend schools in NYC. Other urban schools require studen ts to pass rigorous exams, which are available to students of all socioeconomic statues and races. While yet others might be zone schools where typically only people from the neighborhood attend the school. These are the most racially and socioeconomical ly segregated schools and tend to mirror more of the experiences shared by Aaronwick and his mother. All of these types of urban schools in NYC vary in the levels of teacher attrition, security , and police presence , as well as access to resources for stud ents. Being in school, maintain in g a 3.0 GPA , ta king advanced placement courses and playing sports that are not often associated with urban communities , were all a part of an embodied success as a form of the agency to move to a suburban community to his advantage in order to gain access to a better quality of life in the long run. Av Sakeena: Do you feel like you have to work? Rajon: If I want money. Sakeena: have to work and I want to work. Where do you fit? Rajon: Do I want to work? Yeah. All that free tim e I got I might as well be at wrong place at the wrong time or something. Sakeena: So are you telling me that working is like a way of staying out of trouble? Rajon: m keeping myself out of trouble you know. I spent some time observing Rajon in his English classroom at Quahog High School during his senior year. He was a quick learner, worked fast , and often finished his work early in 145 class. T he work in his Advanced Placement English course was not as academically demanding as the work we completed in the WCL. As such, he rarely had homework. Between our third and fourth interview , Rajon began working at a local fast food restaurant. He wo rked long hours and I was concerned that he was not getting enough sleep. Therefore, I asked why he had a job. At this point , I had known him for almost a year and he did not have a job, at least for the duration of our relationship. Rajon was always cl ean, fed , and well dressed whenever I saw him. As I began to pull back the layers of why he was working , I came to realize that he was working to stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, Rajon knew too many friends who became fatal victims because they were a e had in his schedule. By taking care of his schoolwork in school (being a from urban communities. He was being responsible, achieving, and not complaining. S akeena: [laughs] I think it was like 2 o'clock in the morning [laughs] you sent me this long email. Rajon: writing it um I don't know ye cell phone and laughs] Sakeena: Okay so that essay, if I recall, was it was kind of similar to what you did over the summer. Um it was like a more detailed and extended version, but like why were you writing a bout that at 2 o'clock in the morning? Rajon: [laughs] Sakeena: Rajon: This excerpt comes from one of our interviews in mid Spring 2014 academic year. As is suggested from the excerpt above, Rajon email ed me late one night at approximately 2 :00 am on 146 Tuesday night (a school night) in February. Rajon emailed me because he said he was bored and could not sleep that night. Therefore, he had time, space , and opportunity to reflect on his life. Rajon and I had several conversations about life and how we grew up. As such, it was not shocking that he would email me in the middle of the night with one of his reflections. His written reflection in the middle of the night was not related to any school assignme nt. Rather, he knew that he could openly express himself with me and so he did. I am very fortunate that he gifted me with such an opportunity. the intellectual and social safety that we had established almost a year beforehand. As the excerpt also suggest ed , this reflection he sent was an extension of the thoughts and ideas he revealed in his A LENs essay. As such, the themes were the sam e; dreams of making it out of Quahog, refusing to become a negative statistic , and going off to college to make a better life for himself and future family. In our conversation , he told me that he was also able to share his story with his principal. He had gained confidence from WCL that his untold story was a valuable story to tell. When his principal read the story, he shared the story with the superintendent of the Quahog school district. The superintendent (who also knew Rajon personally through a local mentoring program) w Rajon had perfect timing! It turn ed that when Rajon shared his reflections with us, the superintendent was also a part of the planning committee for the (then upcoming) education fundraising eve nt in Quahog. As such, they wanted two students to give keynote speeches for so Rajon was asked to share his at The Amphitheater (pseudonym) in April 2014 for an audience 147 of approximately 750 people with the goal of raising money for the Quahog school district. The audience consisted of students, teachers, principals, school district administrators, university leaders, as well as private funders in education. A started in my WCL writing class, was going to be shared to hundreds of p eople in his the Quahog told my mom and she like gotta tell everybody and she trying invite people . We both laughed and I explained that sh e was just excited that her son was chosen for such a , I got stage fright. I never wan ted to speak in front of the class , even though many people think he i s brilliant. Rajon was excited that he was selected to share his story, though he was not thrilled about the idea of speaking in front of a large audience. During our time together th at day, he reflected about an experience from elementary school (fifth grade) when he was in a class play. He had stage fright then too. I asked why he feared being in front of people and he said that he was that h e was a human being. I stuck around later than usual that day. After our formal interview, I helped Rajon practice for his presentation. We went over some basic tips like printing the speech in large print and projecting his voice , etc. During the prac He was both excited and scared to share his story with 148 A couple of months later, Rajon spoke in front of 750 people in The Amphitheater. I managed to get support from my university to get a tick to the event . T ickets were $150 (for seats in the back). The most expensive tickets were $10,000 for a table. Rajon wore a suit that day ; it wa and (pictures) with him and his long - term girlfriend, Crystal (pseudonym). The Amphitheater raised $260 ,000 that night. I received this information in a letter a couple of weeks after the event. This letter was sent to all who attended the event. They had a paragraph in the letter that book about my life. I could write in the book about things that changed my life and my vision on , writing t . Doing work and paying attention we re embodied manifestations of the serious scholar identity that Will wa s constructing for himself. Because Will t ook being a scholar hea dphones on while reading a book or typing on his laptop. When I asked Will what he did outside of school, he reported that with his friends he play ed video games, play ed basketball, or just s at outside on the porch talking. Recently, he noted, Reading help ed hi 149 Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Inferiority by Tom Burrell (2009) helped him to think critically about Black inferiority. Sak eena: challenging aspects about being Will Allen, what would you say? Will: I would say, um changing the person who I was. Sakeena: Is that the most rewarding or the most challenging? Will: uhhhhhh rewarding Sakeena: [Laughs] okay. Will: went to summer school for the first time [Will hits the desk to the cadence of . Sakeena : Will: Yes Sakeena: Pretty young Will: I know [laughs] . So I went to summer school. It was a hot summer doing this again. So I changed who I was. I started, um doing all my school and I guess that brought me here too. This excerpt c ame from a follow up interview between Will and I. It g ot at the heart of several intersecting identities for Will. This conversation sp oke to the intentionality by which Will work ed to maintain a scholarly presence in both Urbantown High School and in the WCL academic enrichment program. It helped me to better understand why Will almost always appeared very serious and/or studious in the summer academic enrichment program. Will was always very respectful, helpful, approachable, and smiling. Yet, he had a serious demeanor when it came to his academics and his embodied sch olarly behaviors. According to Carter potential barrier to success can develop adaptive strategies for schooling that allow them to persist academically" ( p . 14 ). Will believed that people perceived African Americans as less strong work ethic that involved reading and working diligently outside of class, he was resisti ng 150 these negative stereotypes. His third grade summer was a signal for him to get his act together. He was intentional to emphasize this critical and unusual point by hitting the desk with his hand - the - first - time By this, Will made sure that I understood he was young. It was also important for Will to communicate to me that the conditions of air conditioning forced him to re flect and conclude, Wi GPA and landed him in the WCL program. When he made th is decision, he also decided that he had the agency to alter his academic outcomes and put his beliefs in individual agency and meritocracy. Will sp oke to the agency that he ha d in his ability to re - invent himself. Noguera (2003; 2008 ) put it another way, we must acknowledge that individuals have the agency (individual choice) to resist, subvert, and react to cultural and social forces in their environments. Will was activating his agency by resisting stereotypes about Black people, e specially Black males. He connected his decision in third grade to his current academic achievement. Going to summer icans are not reminders to the importance of high academic achievement. He was proving that he wanted to on in the third grade to be a scholar still 151 ed him to attend WCL and have a 3.9 GPA on a 4.0 scale in hi ultimately position him to pursue his dreams. Sakeena: Will: I just want to give up and not do anything, [but] lay in the bed all day, not go to school. But I keep pushing. [I] keep doing it because I know it will pay off in the future. Sakeena: Um hm. So like what sorts of things like motivate you to like get up and keep going? Will: I say my future. Because I know if I lay in the bed all day, um if I quit school. Where can I end up? I can end up in jail or homeless. I know my mom and dad are not always going to be around and like being on my own, I think that Maintaining his serious scholar identity was the most challenging aspect about Will, according to Will. Though Will mentioned wanting to give up, he said he pushed through because he was less because this is what he witness ed in Urbantown from other young Black men who he felt were not serious scholars. Being in a single - sex , Black male urban high school is a context where young Black men are constantly reminded of these possibilities. Given the statistics about one in four Black men being a part of the judicial system, it is no wonder that Will feared the witness ed experiences in third grade manifested itself into a serious academic demeanor. At several poi nts in the WCL program , I would ask him why he was so serious or I would ask him to loosen up a bit. He would respond by saying that he just wanted to do his work. It was not until he shared these stories outside of the WCL in our interviews that it occurred to me that Will was 152 (Carter, 2008). Going to summer school in the third grade was a traumatic experience for Will. In other words, being in summer school had scared Will so much so that this experience created such passion when he spoke about it as a senior in high school. Sakeena: Um, what is scary about being on your own? Will: Just like being by myself. No one there to help you. Like when I think about my mom and my dad passing away. My family [extended pause] not care of me and my sister [extended p ause]. I have to be the role model. Men are supposed to be responsible, providers , outlook. The fear Will spoke of also connected to his intersecting identity as a son and a middle child (brother). Though he was onl y 17 years old, if something happened to his mother , he would be expected to step up and take care of his sisters. He expressed fear about this role because he wa He would have to model a positi on that he has not seen at home due to the absence of his father. As a 17 year old, he fear ed though Will wa s the middle child, he had no doubt that he would be expected to be the role model and take care of the family. He did not reject this position because that is not what responsible men do. However, it was not something he wanted to experience at th at point in his life. Will was telling us that as the only male in his house, regardless of his age , he was expected to step up and take care of the family. . Sakeena: What sorts of things have allowed you to be successful and get this far? Shawn: like a horrible student in grammar school, upper young ages dying and getting shot or like homeless. Thi ngs like that kind of opened my eyes to how life is real. So when I got to high school I was 153 to change schools. Start a different life. So I say in high school basically I started By the eighth grade , Shawn had seen violence, lost family and friends to homicide , and could personally name friends who had become homeless. Because of these lived realities, he was forced to make some decisions at an early school provided a prime time for Shawn to reinvent himself into the scholar that he knew he could be. Seein g his peers get shot, killed and/or end up homeless pushed Shawn to start a , The transition from junior high school into high school provided a much needed space to the LENs from which Shawn spoke in our interview. confirmed that I U nfortunately , t his intera ction with his teacher is not the first time I become dropouts . However, Shawn was embodying a different approach to education , which 154 and his A rtifactual LENs in the WCL writing class, I wanted to know what led Shaw n to con sider a career in education. Therefore, I asked him why he wanted to be a teacher. Sakeena: Why do you want to be a teacher? Shawn: Well, first my football coach told me I should just like do l leader Sakeena: [laughs] Shawn: e. to better understand, what if anything , probed deeper. To my pleasant surprise, Shawn did find ways to become a part of communities grade to learn more about newspapers an d writing. This program was not affiliated with his middle school and had an explicit aim of cultivating confidence among young writers. The YWC was an independent organization held in the downtown area of his hometown city. At of the short story part of YWC. After working with YWC for a couple of years, he made moves to bring YWC to his current high school. He talked with his English teacher to get help with bringing the organization to his school. In his time at the YWC , he was mentored and eventually started mentoring about 20 young people who wanted to become writers. The program recruited young writers that want to be journalists or that want to do stories , you know , accordin g to Shawn. The students who participated in the program were sixth through twelfth When Shawn described the YWC program in our interview , he was smiling and his 155 demeanor changed. His presentation was drastically different from moments before when he was describing his schooling experiences or talking Black men. He was more relaxed and he said it was whatnot you know You walk inside the building; The As i t turn ed out, Shawn generally felt successful at writing and wrote all of the time. He also enjoyed being in his English class . Shawn said that he always exceeded the word limit expectations in his essays. For example , if he needed 500 words he used to write 700 or 800 because he always ha d a lot to Shawn sp oke to the agency that he felt while writing. He felt in charge and in power over his ability to k full of short stories it would want Black kids to read books , so he would make his writing interesting so that Black children would want to read. Shawn share d that his run s in with ( ) encouraged him to write a lot. It was more than proving teachers wrong. It was also a way of demonstratin , p. 13 ). The conversation with teac her about , it also helped him to 156 become more in tune with what brought him pleasure : writing. When Shawn was writing, he was embodying what I came to see as one of the aspects of his tru est self. Shawn want ed to share his love for writing with young people , to help them to build their confidence in writing and pursue careers in writing. He was a writer and it was a field he specialized in. Negotiating Identity: Assessing, Confronting and Rationalizing Tensions In this section , I discuss how the scholars we re negotiating the identities they construct young men deal t with and rationalize d tensions presented (in academic settings) as young Black men. F or all of the scholars , n egotiating came with particular costs and benefits. In this section , I describe the nature of the tensions they encountered and how they dealt with those tensions. Table 6.3 Negotiation Identity: Assessing, Confronting and Rationalizing Tensions Scholar Theme Chart Aaronwick Rajon Will Shawn . Earlier we learned that Aaronwick did not want to associate himself with African Americans in his school due to the ther King 157 of positive images and experiences of Black people. He shared his disappointment by her words, he lacked valuable knowledge and experiences about his own history as a Black young man, which made Choosing to endure in a predominantly White , middle - class school context created access to not only Advanced Placeme (Carter Andrews, 2012). While his school offered several Advanced Placement courses, I think it is important to note that his school did not offer an Advanced Placement African American Hi story course. Nor did they make any concerted efforts to address issues of race and ethnicity in the curriculum. School was not a place where Aaronwick could learn about the positive and forward moving contributions of Black people. The culture of the s chool (perhaps unconsciously through institutionalized racism) perpetuated a social stigma about Black students through teacher practices and the history of Blacks being null from the curriculum beyond a superficial b Lee, Menkart , & Okazawa - Rey, 2002). It also was not a place where he could advance his critical thinking skills through critical dialogue (Freire, 1970) as evidenced by his earlier reflection on our reading of Pedagogy of the O ppressed : think th academic tensions that Aaronwick had to assess, confront, and subsequently rationalize a response to. Aaronwick was negotiating that school was a place where he could no t learn much about his culture and history as a Black male. However, his school did offer other valuable resources. Aaronwick and I had several conversations about purpose and meaning s of school in his life. For example, Aaronwick said that he loved to travel and take advantage of opportunities 158 institutions like his high school or his (future) university. He expressed that he wished more Black people would road before his first year as an undergraduate student at STU. He was really looking forward to the trip during our interview. According to Aaronwick, he was just perus ing the STU website one application to study abroad in Japan. He receiv ed a notification of his acceptance the next day and he was thrilled to take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad. Sakeena: Do you think everybody has equal access and opportunity to do what you're doing now? Aaronwick: No. Obviously I know that that my surrounding is helping me with this situation. The fact that I go to Northwood High School (pseudonym). The fact that my mom makes a certain amount money. The Sakeena: Well wha Aaronwick: Here Aaronwick demonstrate d how individual efforts (e.g. to study abroad) are situated within larger systems of access, socioeconomic status , and race. Living in a middle class suburban neighborhood, going to a prestigious high school, having a mother as a teacher (in pursuit of a Ph . D . in education) and having an entrepreneur as a father helped to position him to seek Advanced Placement cours es, playing Lacrosse and taking advantage of study abroad opportunities. We learned earlier that for Aaronwick , grades were a reflection of his effort, not his intellect. In school , he experienced both racial spotlighting and racial ignoring ; or he was 159 n egotiating a tension , High School was not a place where he learned about his rich history as an African American. he underst ood that Black males are often negatively profiled and positioned and he refuse d to be bound by stereotypes. Therefore, school became a means to an end and a place where he was negotiating how he could garner certain experiences, make connection s , and network. g ot a new s chedule . Sakeena: Now it's November 1 st , so it's been a minute. Um what's changed [since our last session together in September] , other than your schedule [laughs] ? Yeah, anyway. So what happened to your schedule? R ajon: [laughs] Oh my schedule got changed because um I was kicked out of a class for like two weeks. Sakeena: What? What? What? Rajon: ked out. Yeah, so like my girlfriend was at the door and I had her paper in my backpack. She needed her paper for a class, so I went and took her the paper [to the door] . Sakeena: Um hm Rajon: An and he handed me this paper like you got to fill out the paper to get back that your poor judgment in class has gotten you kicked out. Now sit and write a 10 sentence essay apologizing and saying what you're gonna do year, I times prior to this particular meeting. By this point the administrative assistant, Mrs. Williams knew exactly who I was when I walked into the schoo l and who I was at the school to visit. Let me call him down to the office to intensely at her computer 160 moment, she dialed a phone number on the telephone, which sat behind her computer. Howev er, When I finished signing my name, I stood there patiently. We looked at one another with the smile you give another person when there is nothing else to do in a polite situation. I took my transition. As promised, she c alled two more times. On the fourth try, she spoke to a female teacher on the other end and requested for Rajon to come downstairs. I waited for almost 20 minutes after the final successful phone before Rajon arrived to the main office. When Rajon arri gave me a hug and we sat on the bench in the main office. He explained that he was in Art class, as opposed to his English class that I was there to observe. I told him that he need ed to go back to his Art class and I would meet him at fifth period during his English class (according to his Art. I left the school building to return two hours later. The aforementioned excerpt captures the beginning of our follow up interview. When I asked Rajon about his schedule being changed , been kicked out of class. Because of the nature of the relationship that I have with Rajon as a teacher, mentor , and friend, I was ready to chastise him for being kicked out of class. However, as he began to explain the nature of him being kicked out of class, I became saddened that he had such an awful experience in his Science cla ss. The particulars of the situation are self - reported and I was not there to observe , n or did I speak to the teacher described in the incident. However, 161 his narrative was consistent with several other narratives of students in urban schools who are forc ed in to dehumanizing behaviors or shaming literacy practices. The conversation above illuminates how Rajon wa s negotiating the intersections of his scholar identity and his masculine identity. Because he was researcher, I was transparent about the nature of this research endeavo r; to examine critically Black male academic achievement. Therefore, his calm and casual demeanor struck me as odd. Rajon understood my frustration and concern about him getting kicked out of class during his senior year. Because of his allegiance to his girlfriend, Crystal (pseudonym), he went to the classro - entry into the classroom rested on him writing a Write a 10 sentence essay apolo gizing and saying what for whenever students did something that broke the rules of the classroom. While disturbing, it was a relief that Mr. Cohe n was not only using this practice with Rajon. Moreover , Rajon claimed Mr. Cohen wanted him to write the essay in a desk where he had to sit in the back of the room and face the back wall in the corner. This frustrated Rajon so he told Mr. Cohen, Rajon refused to participate in the activities suggested by Mr. Cohen. Below he describes his frustrations with Mr. Cohen. becau se I wouldn't fill the paper out. It's like he so disrespectful about it. Like it got to the point where like my grade went from an A to a D because I wasn't in Can I get just getting into arguments every time I tried to get the paper. Then it's like I just kept getting kic 162 your authority know what I'm saying - trying to degrade people and all that. I As a senior in high school who was committed to constructing and embodying a scholar identity, Rajon was very conscious about his grades. Simultaneously, he was concerned about his identity as a young Black man interacting with a White male teacher. The tension that Rajon grappled with was maintaining his grades and maintaining his dignity. Rajon was willing to write the essay (that he wholeheartedly disagreed with) in order to maintain his grades that is until Mr. Cohen insisted that he write the essay in the back corner facing t he wall. Rajon said he normally sits in the front of the room, so he can get his work done. Writing an essay that he imes while he explained this situation. The repetition speaks to the angst of his frustration with this negotiation. Rajon was no longer interested in maintaining his A in that class if it meant that he would succumb to disrespect. This situation create d dissonance for the identity that he was constructing for himself as a young Black man and as a scholar who took care of his responsibilities. He even consulted with his girlfriend for advice about the matter because it bothered him so much. This was a major negotiation for Rajon. Ultimately, he rationalized that maintaining his grades were not worth being dehumanized . Because he said Mr. Cohen was disrespectful six times, I inquired about which part of called the details from this experience in class, his body language changed. He sat more erect at the table and he began using hand gestures to point toward the main office area as he explained what happened after he got kicked out of class several times. said. He was turning red and stuff and I got [my schedule] changed. asked Rajon if Mr. 163 m. Mr. Cohen was a White male Science teacher in his early to mid - thirties. Rajon said, I mean like yeah. He tried to bring up his past like, If you need help with anything, just come to me. I didn't really care about high school when I was in high school. I would cut class and do all of that or whatever. I'm like man, dude you a joke! Rajon was not interested in having a White male disrespect him because of his identity as a young Black man. Rajon felt patronized by Mr. Cohen by alluding to the fact that they had something in common. Furthermore, Rajon did care about school, which is why he was negotiating writing the paper. He felt that Mr. Cohen did not know who he was as a student or age. Sakeena: What sorts of things do you like to do? Will: else? I wanted to go into engineering. I thought about the Air Force to do stuff Sakeena: I know there are things we do for money. Then there a re those things Will: When we leave and they give us a hug and show us they learned something from what we did in class and it makes me feel good. When I first asked Will about what he like d to do he told me about a series of jobs that he would do for money. They were al l viable, successful , and prestigious careers that were in male dominated fields. Perhaps, he did this unconsciously. They did align with his love for math and solving problems. However, when I pulled back the layers into what really made Will feel good about himself, he named teaching as a career. At first , he was nervous due to his lack of experience working with young people. After a while , working with young people and seeing 164 Being an electrical engineer or serving in the Air Force are both important and respectable careers. However, Will was negotiating between careers that sounded good to him (and perhaps the outside world) and what actually made him feel good. He negotiate d his desires and realities by focusing on an unknown future. Will: It really made me smile on the inside. Like I said so many African class and wanna read books without some body forcing them to made me feel Sakeena: Will: know. to be in the company of other African Americans who wanted to do something with their lives. Because Will read books outside of class about Black history and he paid a ttention to his current surroundings in Urbantown - he believed Blacks were very talented, but they wasted it. He enjoyed both learning and teaching, especially teaching young people who did not have to be ing to share (Perry, 2003). African Americans come from a long lineage of achievers and what made Will feel good was sharing in that among other African Americans. He shared that he wished that in Urbantown H.S. t hey ire, 1970) because it would help the youth be more productive in their own communities : Participating in WCL may have re - last formal inter view in at Urbantown High School at the end of the school year , he shared that he made a decision to study Elementary Education in college. At Urbant ow n elementary (on the first two floors of Urbant ow n High School) he had opportunities to teach a class of 30 165 elementary students. He explained that working at Liberty School in WCL in the prior summer b ecame m y p Sakeena: So are you like still connected with the YWC group? Shawn: think I stopped I would say my sophomore year 'cause football became my priority. Sakeena: Why is football your priority? Shawn: done my academics thing. Sakeena: that football would like pay for education would you be as invested in it? Shawn: Ummm, not really. Sakeena: senior year at Urbantown, Shawn spoke at length about how much he loved football, he spent co about how he appreciated attention that he received from his coaches, teammates, and of course , the ladies. Yet, when I asked him about his investment in footb all, he framed football as merely his community for a couple of years. He wr ote plays and he even informed me that he want ed to write urban fiction novels an d become an English teacher. If football were not a way to alleviate the burden of college attendance fees, he probably would no t even play. This speaks volumes to the pervasive trope of the Black male athlete ; This should shatter our understandings about the motivations academically high performing Black males have for being on sports teams. Shawn learned that sports can pay for school and the n trained to invest infinite amounts of time performing as an athle te when his heart may not even be it. Shawn loved the camaraderie and attention he received from coaches and girls for being in 166 the starting lineup. However, he did not light up the ways he did when he spoke about the writings on the wall at the YWC. Th erefore, this wa s a huge tension. As such, he was negotiating the writer and scholar he wanted to be with prioritizing football. Notice how the institutional discourses about young Black men dictate d his actual performance. He prioritize d a sport that h e believed would pay for his education and put his love for writing to the background instead of do ing the things he actually loved to do : write and teach young people. Some argue that Black males only go to school in order to play on football teams. However, Shawn share d with us a different story, an untold story. That is, he play ed sports in order to go to school, despite having a 32 of 36 of the ACT exam. This brings us back to what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) note d; that we must listen carefully and closely to what students are saying and how they are saying it. If I were not listening closely to what he was saying about football, then I probably would not have asked him if he really wanted to play football. Also, notice how my question prompted him to think critically about his position as a scholar and a football player. We engaged in dialogic conversation; we actively listened to one another and I asked follow up questions that push ed the conversation in ways that generate d indicate d that he really had n o t thought about this before, at least not in this way. CNA as a meth od helped me to pay attention to, understand, and question the ways institutional discourses inform personal narratives. Shawn kn ew he has purpose ( i.e. in writing or in school) outside of sports, but he prioritized football over writing. Shawn was featur ed on the news for having the most college acceptances from his school. Fortunately, by our last formal interview at Urbantown High School , Shawn had realized need football in order to pay for college. Playing football is not a bad thing. 167 However, for students like Shawn, he needed to know there were alternatives to college. By the end of his senior year, Shawn was accepted into 37 colleges/universities and a massed over $500 K in academic scholarship s to cover his attendance. Furthermore explained that being in WCL and teaching at the Liberty Elementary School reassured his love for teaching young people. It was the first time he actually created lesson plans and executed them. At the Urbanto w n Elementary School, he took advantage of an opportunity to teach 28 first - graders during his senior year , and he loved it. He also co - t aught freshmen English at Urbantown High School. Altogether, h is various teaching experiences led him to consider em being so young it would be an outlet Achieving While Black and Male ( D iscussion) Black boys and men are enigmatic in educational spaces (Dancy, 2014). That is , people find young Black men in educational spaces to be mysterious or d ifficult to understand. The unfortunate result is that many young Black men are often misunderstood in classrooms and schools. According to Brown (2011), "for numerous decades, both the findings and theories used to make sense of Black males within the s ocial science and education literature have helped to produce a common - sense narrative about all Black males" (p. 2047), as if Black males are monolithic in nature. As such, Brown encourages researchers to carefully examine the diversity of Black male exp difference that have persisted within educational discourse. By documenting and nuancing the multi - 168 s help teachers and education researchers adequately address the needs of Black male students. These untold stories help us to better understand how their identities are shaped by and shape their experiences in schools. Tatum (1997) explains the The concept of identity is a complex one, shaped by do capture our attention are those and their respective high schools), the scholars were critically conscious about their identities as tudents to situate their academic and life goals in realities of social inequity. This type of consciousness does not have to result in students internalizing a victim mentality; rather it can ignite academic motivation and (p. 24 ) Noguera (2003; 2008) put it another way ; that we must acknowledge that individuals have the agency (individual choice) to resist, subvert, and react to cultural and social forces in their environments. This acknowledgement is important because "there are students who manage to maintain their identities and achieve academically without being ostracized by , p. 446 ). Shawn, Aaronwick, Will , and Rajon are prime examples of young Black men who maintained their identities and also achieved academically. Being scholars were not seen as separate from their Blackness or their maleness. Therefore, they were achieving while Black and male. They had the traits of a scholar identity while also maintaining a critical race consciousness. What I s how here was how the scholars made sense, enacted, and managed their identities, particularly in academic spaces. 169 In spending much time with the scholars, I came to understand the scholars were intentional about constructing, negotiating, and embodying particular identities. However, this young Black men. For example, learning or being smart was important to all of the scholars. They resisted the notion that Ogbu, 1986). Instead, learning was a key feature of the Black masculine identities. They believed that it would not only expand their personal opportunities, but also the advantages of their families and communities. The young men saw learning as an important responsibility of being both Black and being a man. Each of the scholars demonstrated a strong sense of their worth. Because the scholars spent much time confronting tensions ab out who people assumed they were and how they saw themselves, they came to understand their persistence in high academic achievement and staying out of trouble as a valuable part of their identities. They chose to not settle for less. Therefore, they als o engaged in hard work and sometimes endured uncaring and unjust spaces (Howard, 2008; Howard & Flennaugh, 2011) in order to prove to themselves and to others that Black young men are worth caring about. They actively sought respect to defy negative stati stics and d heteronormativity, and Black maleness. Having intergenerational conversations helped the scholars to develop the confidence and language to disrupt single stories about young Black men. As revealed earlier through conversations with their parents, teachers , and myself, the scholars engaged intentionally and regularly engaged in intergenerational conversations with adults. These conversations influenced their everyday decisions. The mos t effective were open, direct, and honest. In situations where these conversations were humanizing as 170 opposed to dehumanizing, the adults in their lives were t houghtful and responsive in the ways involuntary utterances , ely display what they have already learned (Juzwik, Borsheim - Black, Caughlan, & Heintz, 2013). In other words, the scholars appreciated opportunities, especially in academic spaces where they were challenged to develop questions and to think critically. The scholars wanted to utilize prior knowledge toward the goal of co - constructing or teacher listened bring a branch conclude d opposed to intellect. This understanding was a major factor in the ways the young men engaged with academic spaces. through writing and performative acts. Writing in this study served as an impetus for deconstructing critical theory, naming their realities, constructing particular identities for themselves, and advancing arguments about their positionalities as young Black men in education and the larger society. Enacting these vulnerabilities raised their critical consciousness about themselves and others. In WCL, the students took an enrichment course on Social Justice Issues. In this course , they learned about the history of African Americans/Black people in America in ways that preceded slavery and they also addressed contemporary issues of in justice (e.g. following the 171 Trayvon Martin case or deconstructing school funding policies). This is part of what Aaronwic k was referencing in the interview excerpt above. Learning about his history in Social Justice in combination with my Writing course, and the Examination of Urban Schools and Communities helped raise his consciousness about the salience of racial identity in his own life. Participating in WCL meant an opportunity of exposure to a different sense of self. He was learning about the inventions of Black people and their status as kings and queens ; these were associations that better fit the identity that he was constructing for himself. His words ; (hooks, 1994) we created was conducive to a positive identity construction for Aaronwick. By reading and writing about scholars of color and being surrounded by academically successful Black students, he was enacting a type resistance against a single story about Black males. He was intentionally disrupting single stories about Black males throu gh this resistance. 172 CHAPTER 7 : #B lackLives M atter - 10 ( Conclusions, Recommendations, and Reflections ) The purpose of this cross - context , critical ethnographic case study was to explore how writing might function as a catalyst for under standing the scholarly identities and educational experiences with in a sample group of academically successful Black male students. This study intentionally and unapologetically centers the voices of academically successfully Black male students; those vo ices are complex and work to disrupt single stories . E xploring their w riting (as an entry point) provide s s lens through which to better understand their perceptions of their own scholarly identities as racialized and gendered beings. As established in C hapter 2, there is a need for more research that examines the writings and educational experiences of academicall y successful young Black men in secondary classroom settings during the academic school year. educational experiences in their respective schools, I provided some importan t cross - contextual nuances for educators to consider in their work with young Black men in their classrooms. These cross - contextual nuances provide d insight about what matter ed to young Black men as they construct, embody and negotiat e scholarly identitie s in and across academic spaces. Therefore, I was able to analyze, interpret, and synthesize ways to encourage, support, and sustain these scholarly identities among young Black men. In doing research with young Black men, I endeavored to reveal the subst ance of Black life for young Black men. The field needs for more scholars to document the nuances of Black male lives, especially those who manag e to navigate educational systems in relatively successful ways. This research utilized critical na rrative analysis of qualitative data. I first offered the A rtifactual LENs essays (see C rtifactual 173 LEN s with in - depth interviews. Participants in this study included four Black male high school students . In Phase I , the scholars were rising seniors in high school. In Phase II , the scholars were seniors in high school. The collected data was coded, analyzed , and organized first by research question , then by analytic categories , and then thematic subcat egories. As a reminder, this study was based on the following t wo research questions: In what ways might artifactual literacies education narratives (A LENs) function as a catalyst for unpacking the educational experiences of academically high performing young Black men? How do these young men (a) construct (define & make sense of), (b) negotiate, and (c) embody scholarly identities as raced and gendered beings? analytic categories are (1) A rtifactual LENs and (2) intersectional identities. The same analytic categories were used to code the data and present the findings in C hapters 5 and 6 by thematic subcategories: (de)humanizing stories, (myths of) meritocracy stories, and refusal stories as well as constructing, embodying , and negotiating identities. The purpose of C hapters 5 and 6 were to present the findings from the data. In this chapter, I provide interpretive insights into the findings. The previous fin dings broke down the stories of the data into analytic categories. However, the goal of this chapter is to provide a cohesive and more complete understanding of the stories. In this way, I provide a layered synthesis of the two previous chapters by integ rating the literature on Black males. Altogether, there were three levels of analysis. In the first level of analysis, I searched A rtifactual LENs. Next, I sea rched for themes in their individual in - depth interviews about their 174 A rtifactual LENs. Afterward, I searched for connections between the A rtifactual LENs, in - depth interviews, videos from class , and my field notes. At the conclusion of the first level of analysis, I pulled out significant stories from the young men about their educational experiences. rtifactual LENs, interviews and field notes. At that point, what emerge d were some simil arities across the scholars with regard to the types of stories they were telling me. Therefore, I established the second analytic category (intersectional identities). What I noticed across the analytic categories were the thematic subcategories: (de)hu manizing stories, (myths of) meritocracy stories, and refusal stories as well as constructing, embodying and negotiating identities. In the third level of analysis, I tied in relevant theory and research issues raised in the literature that I noticed among and between the scholars. Recommendations for Teachers and Teacher Education argued the significance of Teacher Education (TE) programs having an explicit focus on issues of diversity across the curriculum as opposed to in one or two courses and field experiences. While specialized programs and concentrations that prepare prospective teachers to meet the needs of diverse learners are instrumental, I agree with Nieto (2000) who asserts, "We can no longer afford to teach only specialized teachers about children of diverse backgrounds. All courses need to be infused with content related to diversity, from secondary math methods to is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore racial disparities in academic achievement. Even though populations of students of color (racially, ethnically, and linguistically) are increasing exponentially , the majority of the teachers in the U.S. are Wh ite (Sleeter, 2008). There is a dire need to critically examine what works and what has the potential 175 to work when it comes to preparing our teachers to teach ever - evolving , diverse populations of students. One of the unfortunate realities about taking u p issues of cultural diversity, particularly in TE classrooms , is that diversity is often thought of as independent from the curriculum, as opposed to being embedded in the curriculum itself. According to Villegas and Lucas (2002), culturally responsive t eachers embody six stranded traits: (a) socioculturally conscious, (b) have affirming views of students from diverse backgrounds, (c) see themselves as responsible for and capable of bringing about change to make schools more equitable, (d) understand how learners construct knowledge and are capable of promoting knowledge construction, (e) know about the lives of their students, and (f) design instruction that builds on what their students already know while stretching them beyond the familiar. These six s t rands consist of the knowledge, skills and dispositions teachers should have in order to effectively teach students from diverse backgrounds. The strands outlined by Villegas and Lucas (2002) , represent the interconnectedness of the organizing framework of their infusion curriculum proposal; they centralize diversity , rather than sideline diversity. Milner (2009) builds from the work of Villegas and Lucas (2002) and asserts preparing teachers to teach is about teachers building a repertoire of knowledge, attitudes, mindsets, belief systems, and skills for success through a teaching journey : teachers develop cognitive and analytical skills to continue learning through processes of improving their work . Milner suggests that all teachers should have a curric of diversity. Milner emphasizes (1) concepts that all teachers need to know before they enter the classroom and (2) calls teacher education programs to better prepare TE students for more complic schools. In this dissertation, I illuminated some of the ways the scholars understand and 176 construct knowledge. Therefore, I offer some concrete recommendations for teac her education programs (pre - service teachers) , teachers , and school s (in - service teachers). Based on my assessment of findings from A rtifactual LENS (analytic category 1), I d intellectually safe their lived experiences within and through the academic curriculum that honored their racialized and gendered experiences. Artifacts present interesting oppor tunities for students to access and articulate their experiences in schools and perhaps across content areas. This will require a reframing on how we define rigor in the classroom. It will also require some professional development support for teachers ( through schools and teacher education programs) to learn about ways to theoretically and practically integrate their discipline - specific content into the curriculum. Teachers could be rewarded by their schools (i.e. professional development hours) for lea rning about and incorporat ing socially and intellectually safe spaces in their classrooms, especially for their Black male students. This study suggests the scholars thoroughly enjoyed opportunities to explore aspects of their identities in the classroom that are often left out of the classroom. We need to welcome their whole selves into the classroom and provide creative outlets for young Black men to engage critically in academic assignments. When the scholars had established trust and respect for thei r humanity, they went above and beyond to complete assignments. More importantly, they were able to become more confident in constructing particular identities for themselves in unapologetic ways. For example, Rajon and Shawn openly identified as writers . When I affirmed that side of their identities , Shawn opened up to me about his time in YWC and Rajon sent me emails months after our formal time together to write more about his life. He confessed 177 that he wanted to write a book and appreciated the oppo rtunity to be openly scholarly and My understandings of intersectional identities (analytic category 2) le a d s me to recommend that schools create and/or revise incentive structures for learning about and valuing the lives and cultures of stu dents. As Shawn note d , schools demonstrate their values by what they choose to invest in. I recommend that schools invest in student - centered evaluations of co llegiate settings, we afford undergraduate students opportunities to evaluate their instructors. In like manner, I suggest that students in K - 12 settings have opportunities to evaluate the quality of instruction by their teachers. These evaluations shoul d happen at least on two points in a given academic cycle (mid semester and the end of the semester or year as appropriate). These evaluations should not be used to punish teachers. Rather, they should be used as opportunities (1) to teach the students about the elements of quality education and (2) allow teachers to see through a different LENs. Aaronwick, Shawn, Will and Rajon appreciated opportunities to critical ly engage in dialogue and writing about ways to improve schools. They felt valued when they were equipped with language to describe and assess quality pedagogical practices. When we collectively (as a WCL staff) equipped the scholars with language to def ine and defend themselves, the quality of their work and critical thinking skyrocketed. The questions on the they would like to do concerning the content area , or about their most/least effective assignments in the given cycle. These evaluations should be utilized as another data point to inform teacher instruction and engage students . I believe that more teachers than we realize genuinely want to be bet ter teachers. However, they may be teaching (perhaps unknowingly) in ways that do no t 178 allow students opportunities to acknowledge their humanity and maximize opportunity for critical engagement nd depth in intellectual thought were activated in important ways when the curriculum centered them as students . Students could also play a vital role in identifying the teachers who provide academically rigorous and intellectually safe spaces. This mig ht be utilized to provide public acknowledgement of these teachers at a school assembly. Administrators could also provide opportunities for student - recognized teachers to observe and mentor other teachers in the building. The goal here is to acknowledge , value , and normalize the student voice within the formal structure of schools in non - punitive ways. I recommend that teachers provide more opportunities for artifactual project - based learning that involve s y engaged with the content, process , and impact of the A LENs projects. We worked on this project for four weeks and each stage of the process built on the previous stage. Seeing the complete project and affording opportunities for the students to reflec t on the process both interpersonally and i nt ra personally extended their learning in meaningful ways. I noticed in my follow up interactions with the scholars during the academic school year that they still utilized some of the content and experiences fro m the A rtifactual LENs project. Artifacts are rich in meaning and are memorable. In other words, engaging in a project that included their lives created some lasting impressions A rtifactual LENs can be adopted for various academic disciplines (i.e. math, history, social studies, science) and utilized for all age groups. Plus, this would not only benefit the academically high achieving Black male students, it would also provide o pportunities for those students who are considered 179 low achieving students an access point to reveal their intersectional identities in important ways for the student and teacher. I want to remind the reader that this study d id not highlight Black male f ailure. Rather, it s ought to understand what we could learn from academically high achieving Black males so that we could meet the needs of all Black male students. The scholars in this study provide d valuable insight about a variety of attributes and ac tivities that attract Black male students in classrooms. As a reminder, the scholars represented in this study came from a variety of family backgrounds, San Pedro , 2014). When they feel listened to and seen , they began establishing invaluable or enigmatic nature of (Dancy, 2014) of Black males in academic spaces . This work intentionally addresse d the narrow constructions of Black masculinities and scholarly identities for Black male youth, especially in English (Kirkland, 2009) . We need to better understand the constructions, embodiments, and negoti ations Black males engage in within schools and communities. Shawn, Rajon, Will , and Aaronwick were all academically high performing Black male students. However, they all understood how fragile that positioning was. Each of them understood assumption s about Black males, which is why they fought so actively to resist negative stereotypes. Furthermore, they understood how at any given moment, they could easily as a rising senior) went from an A to D in a two - week period evidence d the instability of high academic performance. Had that been a required course and in his junior year when colleges we re paying particular attention to academic grades, his outcome coul d have been drastically 180 different. Will and Shawn evidence d this by being in both the low achieving and high achieving academic circles. Aaronwick also show ed us this when he fe lt classes until teachers s aw that he is Altogether, we see how the assumption of Black males in classroom, at least from the LENs of Black males , is that of a successful college - bound scholar. At the same time, I must also remind the reader about the consequences of success. The sch olars described the consequences of success as an uphill battle of proving people wrong and constantly defining themselves against of negative ideologies. This work is draining! In what ways, are we helping young Black men in our classrooms to navigate t hese spaces? As teachers we can be more intentional about addressing issues of inequality in our cl assrooms. This will help Black male students to establish some social and intellectual safety in our classrooms. Recommendations for Future Research This study considered the academic experiences of four young Black men from three different school districts across two states. Due to the small size of participants in this study, I would recommend expanding this study to include a larger number of Black male participants who are academically high performing in mainstream secondary classrooms. I encourage the use of artifacts, writing, and critical dialog as an entry point for understanding the academic experiences of young Black men in schools. There is also a need for more inter - and multi - disciplinary studies involving enrichment activities of academically successful Black male students in both longitudinal and cross - contextual ways. These studies should further consider the sociocultural and perhap s cognitive impact or benefits of writing. Another consideration for future research concerns the terminology that we use to describe students. I struggled with high achieving 181 , the young men ena cted particular performances my assessment , e measures) White middle - class suburban high school, according to Aaronwick , learned important academic assessments in his class and successfully regurgitated them back to his instructors on paper. However, it was not until he spent the summer at WCL that he learn ed how to think critically for himself through his coursework. Reflections I started writing this dissertation years ago because Black l ives m atter. W hen I started hashtag for Black Lives, yet I always knew in my heart that Black Lives Matter. 11 My experiences as a Black female student in Title I urban public schools in New York City (K - 12 grades) and engaging in interdisciplinary undergraduate studies at Cornell Un iversity , contribute d to my keen awareness of the multidimensional influences that theory, research, and practice have in shaping the schooling experiences of students. As an English teacher in a Title I urban public middle school, I grappled with the abs identities in the curriculum . Therefore, in my doctoral work , I have become invested in student learning and teacher preparation. In fulfilling this investment, I have maintained my connections to the classroom with young people. I designed and executed writing curriculum (for the past six years) for my students in ways that demonstrated that their lives matter. This dissertation i s one manifestation that attempts to capture my value for youth in general and Black l ives in particular. This is indeed a labor of love. The other part of fulfilling this investment has been in teacher 182 preparation. I have taught teachers (pre - service a nd in - service) and secondary students across multiple contexts. My goal in this area is to assist in developing highly qualified and competent are a part of the curriculum, as opposed to separate from the curriculum. I am concerned about the intersectional identities and experiences of academically successful Black males, especially as they engage in writing in and across academic contexts; I use literacy to critically inves tigate the ways these students navigate academic spaces. Therefore, I s ought to (1) understand effective literacy solutions that are socially and intellectually s afe for students (Lee, 2006), and collaborate with teachers to foster culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012) and humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) classroom spaces. Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon , and Will are four Black male scholars who came from three different sch ool districts. They offered a variance of perspectives on issues of discourses in education, meritocracy, and institutional racism , and how those concerns impacted their intersectional identities as young Black men in schools. Because there is no shortage on dismal and value their lived experiences in schools. These young men have managed to navigate school systems in seemingly successful ways. You have h attempted to nuance some of the ways the scholars constructed, negotiated, and embodied scholarly identities across ac ademic spaces. Their stories cultivate d more complete stories about young Black men and they also disrupt ed single stories about young Black men. Their stories should give us some pause when we make assumptions about young Black men, especially in 183 academ . I n what ways are we being upfront and honest with Black male students in our classroo ms from the first day of class? These are very real thoughts the scholars ha d in academic settings. How can we address these insecurities and affirm their identities and let them know they are valued? How might we open the creativity door for them to expl ore themselves as a part of the curriculum, instead of in opposition of it? This speaks to the need for more research in this area with this population. This work is also unique and contributes to the field in that it critically examine d the ways young B lack men in secondary mainstream classrooms grapple with issues of identity as they (successfully) navigate academic spaces. This work wa A rtifactual LENs. T wo crucial findings of my dissertation are (a) metaphors function as a powerful catalyst for unpacking the racialized and gendered literacy identities of the young men, especially in spaces where tea chers validated such identities and (b) intersectional identities was leveraged to assert agency in their academic and non academic communities. These findings deepen our can recognize, cultivate, and sustain scholarly literacy identities among their Black male students. Throughout the dissertation, I had candid, open conversations with the young men about school, life expectations , etc. F rom the beginning, I expected them to be scholars and treated them as such. We had conversations about critical theory. We read book s and articles. At no point did I feel like I needed to "dumb things down" for them. What I noticed is that each of these scholars had a depth and breadth of local knowledge in a broad range of concepts. W e 184 came together to "name" certain concepts like banking, problem posing , cumulative risks , segregation , meritocracy etc., but the scholars lived these things . O nce I (and other instructors) provided explicit language through reading , writing , and verbal discourses , they were quick to begin to name thes e concepts because they were living them. These scholars were not naive and unknowing empty receptacles. It is my understanding that because the young men occupied such complex intersectional identities as young Black men , they were somewhat forced to un derstand the world at a young age as raced and gendered beings. Their parents, siblings, other family members, teachers , etc. helped them to understand a type of socialization that positioned them to read, write , and engage in a world with complex lenses. This dissertation was an attempt to view and investigate their worlds from their perspectives. Some of my conversations with the scholars far exceeded the depth and breadth of conversations that I've had with some of my undergraduate students in my teach er education courses. Middle - class white females from suburban communities primarily occupy these courses. This is not mentioned to somehow invalidate, demean , or subvert the lived experiences of my undergrad uates . Rather, I'm attempting to reveal how so me of the complex positioning of my scholars equipped them to construct, negotiate , and embody particula r engagements in schooling spaces in interesting ways. These insights hopefully provide d effective entry points of understanding and dealing with young Black men in our classrooms and in society. It is an expressed goal of mine to humanize these scholars and Black men in general. I assert that as a large society , Black men are not seen as or treated as humans, which I believe contribute s to the callous and now normalized ways that we treat Black young men. I remember when it was shocking to observe someone dying or being murdered on a screen. Now, 185 it seems normal to see young Black men killed on video as evidenced by Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott , and several others. If it is indeed normal for Black lives to be taken on video, often times without a murder indictment or criminal charge, then of course it is acceptable for young B lack men to receiv e inferior access to opportunities to engage in schooling that helps them to think critically or be recognized as fully human. We have a responsibility as teachers to directly address these issues in our academic settings. There are many negative stigm as and research that regarding all of the ways that B lack males fail. I think it is time for us to move beyond that and focus on the other side . I want ed to document that there are academically high performing young men , because it seems that a great num ber of people do not realize that students such as the scholars included in this study exis t . For m any people in the summer program, WCL proves that academically success ful young Black men do exist, they do go to college, they get good grades , and more im portantly , are critical thinkers who believe they have valuable things to contribute to the world. They are human and they have high academic outcomes. In my work , I wanted to acknowledge their existence, humanize these young Black men, complicate notion s of what is considered as high performing , and nuance the understandings we have about them . I also focused on factors that contribute d to the construction, negotiation, and embodiment of their experience s toward the goal of developing opportunities for (pre) service teachers to address two main concerns when it comes to working with students that have diverse needs. In the literacy strand of my research, I use d a literacy lenses to critically investigate the ways academically successful students navigate academic spaces. I work ed to build capacities for learning and instruction in ways that we re in solidarity with students. I was they speak about (i.e. understand and mak e meaning of) their own writing across settings. I 186 know that when we believe in students and provide them scaffolds within a rigorous curriculum they will step up to the challenge. They often far exceed our expectations. In this way , it is important to make students lives a part of the curriculum ; not in opposition to the curriculum or as an afterthought of the curriculum. I was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn and was raised in Bed Stuy "Do or Die" Brooklyn. My elementary and middle schools were both i n Bed Stuy. I went to MLK high school - a place where some people think of the students as failures or throwaways. We lived on a low - income. When I went to college, I did not know anyone in my immediate surrounding s who went to college , not to mention a per son who had a Ph . D. According to most statistical measures, I should not be here and doing this work. There are a number of reasons why I sought a Ph . D. However, I am only going to discuss one of those reasons right now that concerns educators/mentors. I a m fortunate that I had teachers along the way who saw things in me that I could no t see in myself. Many educators/mentors along the way (K - Ph . D . ) took time to invest in me and cultivate sincere relationships with me. They did no t "save" me. They beli eved in me, which helped to believe in myself. They knew their content. They listened to me. They modeled for me how to do certain things and introduced me to different opportunities. They had high expectations for me and they treated me like I was imp ortant; they valued my life . I was equipped with language to define and defend myself. These same educators/mentors are intentional about helping me when I mess up or fall short, and I am endlessly thankful. As educators, we must be mindful of how we talk to young people. We need to be intentional about what we say to young people, regardless of the types of communities they come from. Students know when you do not care about them and choose not to invest in them. I hope that my life, pedagogical practices, and research in education helps educators/mentors realize 187 how much influence they can have in the lives of young people. I am one of the products of the genuine generosity of several educators/mentors. I would like to end this chapter with a p oem that has meant much to me as I think about my transition into academy as a faculty member. This poem, written by Rae Paris was so timely and effective. It captured the sentiments of love, shared struggles, and humanity, all of which I have been worki ng toward for years in my quest toward higher education. This poem captures how I felt toward Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon, and Will as I taught them in the WCL, learned with them the during the 2013 - 2014 academic school year that I spent with them and even no w as I attempt to mentor them through this process. It captured the sentiments of love, shared struggles, and humanity, all of which I have been working toward for years in my quest toward higher education. This poem captures how I felt toward Aaronwick, Shawn, Rajon, and Will as I taught them in the WCL, learned with them the during the 2013 - 2014 academic school year that I spent with them and even now as I attempt to mentor them through this process. An Open Letter of Love to Black Students: #BlackLivesMatter by blackspaceblog Black students and professors, Beaumont Tower, Michigan State University, December 6, 2014. photo by Darryl Quinton Evans We are Black professors. We are daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, godchildren, grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, and mothers. We know the stories of dolls hanging by nooses, nigger written on dry erase boards and walls, stories of nigger said casually at parties by White students too drunk to k now their own names but who know their place well enough to know nothing will happen if they call you out your name, stories of nigger said stone sober, stories of them calling you nigger using every other word except what they really mean to call you, sto ries of you having to explain your experience in classrooms your language, your dress, your hair, your music, your skin yourself, of you having to fight for all of us in classrooms where you are often the only one or one of a few, stories of you choosing s ilence as a matter of survival. 188 hear you. In our mostly White classrooms we work with some of you, you who tell us your tears. How do we hold your tears, and your anger? You are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our mothers, our fathers, our godchildren. You, with your stories of erasure break our hearts because you are family, because your stories of erasure ultimately are stories of violence, becau se your stories mirror our experiences, past and present. Right now. This is all happening now. Every day. We know this. We want you to hear. You tell us your stories and sometimes we tell you our own stories of cops who stop us on the way to work, of gran dparents born in Jim Crow, of parents born during segregation into an economic reality that made them encourage us to get solid jobs, of parents born outside the United States who came face - to - face with the harsh reality of U.S. anti - Blackness, how we chos e institutions where we often feel alone. We tell you stories of almost dropping out of school, stories of working harder than anyone else even when it felt like it was killing us, even when it is killing us. We tell you we know historically and predominan tly White universities might let pretty words like diversity, or insult us with the hard slap of minority. We tell you about the underground network of folks who he lped us, the people who wrote us letters, the offices we cried in, the times we were silent, the times we spoke up, the times we the railroad of Black professor s and other professors of color who we call when we know one of to take risks. We tell you, guard your heart. We tell you, keep your heart open. We tell you to hold on. Hold on, we say, to you, to us, because holding on to each other is everything, often the only thing. Hold on. We want a future for you, for us right now. We write this is in solidarity with the families of Tamir Rice, Mike Brown, Renisha McBri de, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and so many others who they are killing, so many others who should have had the chance to be in our classrooms, who should have had the chance to simply be. We write this in solidarity with Harriet Tubm an, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and too many others stolen and gone, too many others who fought for us to be in this privileged place where we still have to fight for justice. We write this in solidarit y with The Combahee River Collective and #BlackLivesMatter who knew and know we have t o fight for and love all of us if any one of us is going to survive. 189 We write this in solidarity with you, Black students, here and elsewhere, and with those on the ground for over 100 days, four and a half hours, two seconds. The living and the dead. We h ear you. We see you. - Blackness, and White Supremacy. This has and will continue to put us in positions we have to defend. This has and will continue to compromise our jobs, our health, our relationships with other people who profess to be our colleagues. This has and will compromise relationships with partners who tell us with love we need to set better boundaries. We study ourselves. We study, we live Black liv es. We organize. We strategize. We march. We angry emails we send, the committees and task forces we serve on, the department meetings where we question and push for more, the colleagues who question our research, our presence, being basic equity, more being the right to exist without explanation or apology, more be ing the right to love and be loved. more. For all of us. - evident . dead. For all of us. We got you. We see you. We hear you. We love you. 10 Please see the Garza (2014) article to learn more about the significance of #BlackLivesMatter. On December 6, 2006 Rae Paris shared her poem with the Michigan State University commun ity. It was later signed by thousands of Black professors across the country . 11 While I was writing the implications and conclusions of my work I found out about Walter L. Scott unarmed black man shot dead while running caught on video in North Charleston South Carolina on April 7, 2015. 190 APPENDICES 191 APPENDIX A Research Participation Information and Assent Project Title: (Re)imagining Literacy Instruction for Black Youth Investigator: Sakeena Everett, PhD Student Department and Institution: College of Education, Michigan State University Contact Information: 620, Farm Lane, 308 Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824; E - mail everet63@msu.edu. Investigator: Dr. Terry Flennaugh, Assistant Pr ofessor Department and Institution: College of Education, Michigan State University Contact Information: 620 Farm Lane, 116L Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, Phone: 517 - 353 9337, E - mail: flennaug@msu.edu You are being aske d to participate in the research study about your schooling experiences and literacy practices in the Summer Scholars High School Program (SSHSP) at Michigan State University. As part of the study, members of the Summer 2013 participants are being asked to participate in the following research project. Your participation will take place over a period of 4 weeks during the summer program and during the academic school year, if agree to participate. During that time you may be asked to participate in two inte rviews. Each interview will last up to 60 minutes and will be audio recorded. However, your name will not be mentioned in any of the audio recordings or transcriptions. You may choose not to participate at all, refuse to answer certain questions, or discon tinue participation at any time. Participation is completely voluntary. You have the right to say no. You may change your mind at any time, refuse to answer certain questions, or discontinue participation at any time. The SSHSP does not give grades duri ng the program, and whether you choose to participate or not will have no affect on your academic grades in your regular school program. All results of this research will be treated with strict confidentiality. Your name or other identifying features will not be used in any analysis or in any reporting of this research. The results of this study may be published or presented at professional meetings, but the identities of all research participants will remain anonymous. The data collected for this researc h study will be protected on a password protected computer or in a locked file cabinet on the campus of Michigan State University for a Institutional Review Boa rd will have access to the research data. Your confidentiality will be protected to the maximum extent allowable by law. Participating in this study poses minimal to no risk to you. The only activity you will be asked to do that is not part of your norma l work at SSHSP is to respond to interview questions. You and other students in SSHSP and at other universities may benefit as the results of this research study are used to learn more about academic identities and schooling experiences in programs like S SHSP. 192 If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact the project investigators: Sakeena Everett, email: everet63@msu.edu, mail: 620 Farm Lane, 308 Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824; Dr. Terry Flennaugh, email: flennaug@msu.edu, phone: 517 353 9337, mail: 620 Farm Lane, 116L Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824. If you have any questions about your ro le and rights as a research participant, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan - 355 - 2180, FAX 517 - 432 - 4503, or e - mail irb@ms u.edu, or regular mail at: 408 West Circle Drive Room 207, East Lansing, MI 48824. I indicate my voluntary consent to participate in this research and have my responses included in the dataset by completing and submitting this consent form. Your signature below means you voluntarily agree to participate in this research study. Signature _____________________________ Date ______________ Name (printed) _________________________ 193 APPENDIX B Research Participation Information and Assent Project Title: (Re )imagining Literacy Instruction for Black Youth Investigator: Sakeena Everett, PhD Student Department and Institution: College of Education, Michigan State University Contact Information: 620, Farm Lane, 308 Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, Eas t Lansing, MI 48824; E - mail everet63@msu.edu. Investigator: Dr. Terry Flennaugh, Assistant Professor Department and Institution: College of Education, Michigan State University Contact Information: 620 Farm Lane, 116L Erickson Hall, Michigan State Univers ity, East Lansing, MI 48824, Phone: 517 - 353 9337, E - mail: flennaug@msu.edu You are being asked to participate in the research study about your schooling experiences and literacy practices in the Summer Scholars High School Program (SSHSP) at Michigan Stat e University. As part of the study, members of the Summer 2013 participants are being asked to participate in the following research project. Your participation will take place over a period of 4 weeks during the summer program and during the academic scho ol year, if agree to participate. During that time you may be asked to participate in two interviews. Each interview will last up to 60 minutes and will be audio recorded. However, your name will not be mentioned in any of the audio recordings or transcrip tions. You may choose not to participate at all, refuse to answer certain questions, or discontinue participation at any time. Participation is completely voluntary. You have the right to say no. You may change your mind at any time, refuse to answer ce rtain questions, or discontinue participation at any time. The SSHSP does not give grades during the program, and whether you choose to participate or not will have no affect on your academic grades in your regular school program. All results of this resea rch will be treated with strict confidentiality. Your name or other identifying features will not be used in any analysis or in any reporting of this research. The results of this study may be published or presented at professional meetings, but the ident ities of all research participants will remain anonymous. The data collected for this research study will be protected on a password protected computer or in a locked file cabinet on the campus of Michigan State University for a minimum of three years aft Institutional Review Board will have access to the research data. Your confidentiality will be protected to the maximum extent allowable by law. Participating in this study poses minimal to no risk to you. The only activity you will be asked to do that is not part of your normal work at SSHSP is to respond to interview questions. You and other students in SSHSP and at other universities may benefi t as the results of this research study are used to learn more about academic identities and schooling experiences in programs like SSHSP. 194 If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to repo rt an injury, please contact the project investigators: Sakeena Everett, email: everet63@msu.edu, mail: 620 Farm Lane, 308 Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824; Dr. Terry Flennaugh, email: flennaug@msu.edu, phone: 517 353 9337, mail: 620 Farm Lane, 116L Erickson Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824. If you have any questions about your role and rights as a research participant, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymousl y if you wish, the Michigan - 355 - 2180, FAX 517 - 432 - 4503, or e - mail irb@msu.edu, or regular mail at: 408 West Circle Drive Room 207, East Lansing, MI 48824. I indicate my voluntary consent to parti cipate in this research and have my responses included in the dataset by completing and submitting this consent form. Your signature below means you voluntarily agree to participate in this research study. Signature _____________________________ Date ___ ___________ Name (printed) _________________________ 195 APPENDIX C College of Education Summer Scholars Program Writing Class Syllabus Course Description and Objectives: The goal of this course is to help you expand your writing and research skills. These skills are essential for success in college and beyond. With strong writing and research skills you will have many opportunities available to you in a wide range of ca reer fields. In order to reach this goal, you will be reading, researching, creating research, and writing about your own schooling experiences. By the end of the summer, you will be able to critically read, write, and use research in ways that may help i mprove education for students. Required Materials: Composition notebook Pen/pencil Dictionary Highlighter Course readings Course Requirements: Reflective essays Research paper Research panel - Classroom Assignments: Reflective Essays Each student is required to submit a 1 - page double - spaced reflective essay based on the course readings to gauge the manner in which students are interpreting course content. Reflective essays should not be mere summaries of course readings, but an analysis, reflection and engagement with course readings. Students may be asked to share from their reflections to generate critical questions for class discussion groups. Use the following guideline when writing your reflection s. (Be sure to refer to Reflective Guidelines for specific details ): 1. Analyze. Demonstrate that you have understood and carefully engaged the arguments of the readings (this should be the bulk of your paper). 2. Consider how briefly referencing your personal experiences (in K - 12 schools or outside of school) might enliven your response AND provide a sense of how you are making broader connections between the readings and the larger social and historical context of schooling. 3. 1 - 2 Burning Questions Research Pa per The research paper will make use of library research, course readings, lectures, interviews, group work, artifacts, and personal experiences to critically analyze a theme from the course. Each individual will provide further research on their topic, o ffer new interpretations, and present 196 creative ways to rethink varying issues involving race, class, and gender in American educational system. We will discuss the length and format in class. Research Panel Toward the end of the class, you and a small group of your peers will create a research panel on which you will discuss your writing and research findings. Your individual presentation should be guided by a visual organizer (e.g., PowerPoint) and must last no longer than 10 - minutes. On the panel, you will be expected to address questions raised to you about your work. The research panels will take place during our last two class sessions. Me - search Mapping Artifact An original artifact will compliment each research paper. Be as creative as possible, think about your own talents, and demonstrate your research in a fun way. The artifact and findings from the research paper will be presented to the class. Table 8.1 Course Schedule Course Schedule Wee k Date Theme Writing Assignments Reading(s) Due 1 7/10/13 Introduction to the course Introductions/Videos 7/11/13 Critical Theory Reflective Writing #1: Tatum The Complexity of Identity by Tatum (5 p) 7/12/13 Metaphors as a powerful tool Reflective Writing #2: Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed , Chapter 2 by Freire (16 p) 2 7/15/13 Teaching - effective and for whom? Reflective Writing #3: Lakoff & Johnson Metaphors we live by, by Lakoff & Johnson (11 p) 7/17/13 Reflective Writing #4: Research topic and rationale 1 - 2 pgs. Reflective Writing #5: Educational experiences Dripping with literacy, a jazz - fueled road trip, a place to breathe by Zancanella (8 p) Reading between the lines and beyond the pages: A culturally relevant approach to literacy teaching, by Ladson - Billings (7 p) 197 Table 8.1 ( cont d ) 7/18/13 Gendered Literacies Reflective Writing #6: Guzzetti and Kirkland Research papers Girls zines as a global literacy practice , by Guzzetti (10 p) Inventing masculinity: Young Black males, literacy, and tears , by Kirkland (9 p) 7/19/13 Critically Analyzing Writing Reflective Writing #7: Tan and Malcolm X Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan (6 p) Prison Studies, by Malcolm X (3 p) 3 7/22/13 Research Projects Peer review (Draft 1) No assigned reading 7/24/13 Research Projects Gallery Walks (Draft 2) No assigned reading 4 7/29/13 Presentations Reflective Writing No assigned reading 7/31/13 Presentations Reflective Writing No assigned reading 198 APPENDIX D - Paper Description Draft 1 July 22, 2013; Draft 2 due July 24, 2013 This work is meant to be a tool for personal, political and intellectual reflection about yourself and its impact on your educational and life experiences. It is important and beneficial for you to cont inuously assess your personal development, confront your weaknesses, and acknowledge your strengths. The purpose of this assignment is to grant you the opportunity to personally, politically, and intellectually reflect on the content of this writing class and your experiences (or lack thereof). In this paper, I expect that you will utilize course readings, discussions, should feel free to bring in your experiences from any of your classes this summer, even at the Freedom School. Within your paper, please consider addressing areas of personal resistance, new knowledge/perspectives, change, and/or insights. To inspire your thoughts, please consider questions such as: 1. What do I think of school? What is the purpose of school or education? What has the purpose of school been in my life? 2. What types of activities and engagements do I think happen there? Why do they happen? 3. How have my educational experiences been influenced by my identity? 4. How have my life experiences contributed to my understanding of others and myself? 5. What significant life experiences have I had that have contributed to my perceptions of racial, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. identities in education? 6. How, if at all, can I use education to create new opportunities for myself (and/or the people I care about)? This paper should include a metaphor that compares your academic experi ences to something you think about your experiences in education (as a teacher or student), what would you compare it to? This should not be a boring essay, so plea se tell your stories in full detail and help the reader experience the moment by using sensory images, active verbs, and compelling metaphors. Please include a visual aid to show your metaphor. We will display these visual aids in class on July 24, 2013 when we do our Gallery Walks. You are expected to use 3 - 5 readings from your classes. At least 2 readings should be from our writing class this summer. You should cite these authors accordingly, and demonstrate through your writing how you understan d their ideas, and the relationship between these ideas and the experiences you are describing. Writing Guidelines Title page 3 - 5 pages, 12 - point font Double - spaced 1 - inch margins on all sides Numbered pages Include a reference page APA format for in - te xt citations and references 199 APPENDIX E Writing Skills Research Paper Paper Description Due July 29, 2013 You are the best and the brightest youth that Michigan and Illinois have to offer in the research area of your choice. As a researcher, you have t he opportunity to investigate (dig deeply) your research interest and use your wisdom to mediate reality concerning that topic. In your project, I expect that you will engage in ongoing conversations and critical reflections with others. This research project should be informed by multiple perspectives on your given topic. Be sure to consider the social, cultural, historical and o ther aspects of your situation. In this way, your research humanizes the individual, allowing him or her to realize the equal capabilities and universal intelligences in all humans, while acknowledging the existence of problems as the result of social forc es beyond his or her doing (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). Students will: Select a research topic Draft research question(s) Investigate solutions to the problem using critical scientific inquiry Interview at least two people about the topic Submit a wr itten paper Present research and findings to the group using multimedia on a research panel Questions Your Research Should Address: What is your research topic? Why did you choose your topic? Who are the stakeholders in the particular institution, organization, or community in question (i.e. policy makers, teachers, administrators, parents, students, artists etc)? What is important to know about your topic? Why? What sources informed your research process and findings? Why? How? What methods d id you use to conduct your research? What did you learn from doing this research? Your research should have at least 3 sources. The sources you use do not have to come from class. However, you can use sources from any of your classes if you want to. You should cite these authors accordingly, and demonstrate through your writing how you understand their ideas, and the relationship between these ideas and the experiences you are describing. Writing Guidelines Creative Title 3 - 5 pages, 12 - point fon t Double - spaced 1 - inch margins on all sides Numbered pages Include a reference page APA format for in - text citations and references 200 APPENDIX F Sample Semi - Structured Interview Protocol Interview Protocol 1 Interviewer : attitudes and beliefs about school, achievement, and race. I want to remind you that a ll your answers will be confidential. The interview is confidential. That means that I won't share anything you say with anyone else, unless you tell me about a plan to hurt yourself or someone else, or if someone is hurting you. Anything you tell me wi ll be private, and you won't get in trouble for anything you say. Only I will know what you said, so answers I want to learn what you think. Does al l that make sense? okay? You can tell me to turn of the recorder at any point, if you want. I may publish my results as a book or in articles, or I might present the findings at conferences. I won't use your name or any other information that would identify who you are, so y ou can pick a code name so that I do not use your real name in any part of my data collection. If after the interview is ov er, you want to withdraw from the study, I'll destroy your information. You won't get in trouble for withdrawing. I'm going to give you my information, so you can call or e - mail me to tell me if you don't want to participate anymore. Do you have any quest ions? Is it okay for us to start? Name: _____________________________________________ 1. Tell me about your high school. 2. What does being in this program mean to you? Why are you here? What motivated you to come to ST U for the summer? 3. What aspect of your identity is most important to you? Why? Please explain. 4. Do you see yourself as a literate person? Why? Why not? What does literacy mean to you? 5. How does literacy play a role in your life? 6. What is your favorite/least favorite subject in school? Why? 7. Wh at is the most rewarding/challenging aspect about being you? Why? 8. What, if any advice do you have for teachers about ways to engage their students using literacy? Wrap - Up 1. 2. Do you have any questions for me? Please Note: This interview protocol is adapted from work of Dr. Dorinda Carter Andrews, one of my professors and dissertation committee members. Naturally, I also asked 201 appropriate follow up questions as needed in the conversat ion. For all of my follow up interviews with the young men in my dissertation, I didn't have a formal protocol at all. Rather, they were open - ended conversations because I knew them quite well at this point. Plus, the artifacts were so rich in meaning tha t there was a lot to learn. The questions only included follow up or clarifying questions on the artifacts or their lives, their school visits that I did or whatever was going on at the time in the news etc. I knew their families, some of their friends, an d they showed me their neighborhoods etc. By the time the school year began 2013 - 2014, there wasn't a protocol because I had spent so much time with them in the summer program. 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adichie, C. (2009). The danger in a single story . Baker - Critical Language Pedagogy in an Advanced Placement English Language Arts Class. Equity & Excellence in Education , 46 (3), 355 370. Bakhtin, M. M. (1 981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays . Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Belcher, W. L. (2009). Writing your journal article in 12 weeks: a guide to academic publishing success . Thousand Oaks, C A : SAGE Publications. Bernal, D. D. (2002). 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